


The Lazarus Effect

by twistedservice



Series: The Fabled [6]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Multi, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Past Character Death, Supernatural Elements, emo hours are open, just far too much crying really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21861292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedservice/pseuds/twistedservice
Summary: About the saints and the soulless and the unfortunate things that exist in the in-between of them all.
Series: The Fabled [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1072044
Kudos: 2





	The Lazarus Effect

But I've a rendezvous with Death  
At midnight in some flaming town,  
When Spring trips north again this year,  
And I to my pledged word am true,  
I shall not fail that rendezvous.  
—I Have a Rendevouz with Death, Alan Seeger

—

—

—

Blair remembers carrying her body to the car.

At that point it wasn’t who was crying - it’s who wasn’t. He hadn’t been. He’s not sure why. It had felt like a place and time where he should be but nothing was coming out.  


Looking back on it, that may have been for the best. If he hadn’t stayed the way he was he’s not sure who else would have done it.

He had seen a lot of things in his life. That came with the territory of being alive for several hundred years and being the direct cause of hundreds of bad things, if not the willing bystander to even more than that.

This, though, he had tried to stop. It was awful being something that could stop almost anything and not being able to stop this.

It was like time had slowed. There was blood on her knife from her attempt to slash Rory across the face, a half-success, and Blair had been looking her dead in the eye, Rory on the ground behind him, when Celia had started shouting her name. He had seen something flicker, so he’s sure everyone else had, too. He hadn’t had the gall to ask since then if anyone had.

There had been hesitance there, a tilt to her head as if even she was confused with what she was doing. That look in her eyes, wrong and wicked, borderline parasitical, had vanished.

For a moment, fleeting and hopeful, it had actually looked like her and not the thing inside her, taken over. It had been her, he knew without a doubt. Just for a split second, enough to realize what she was doing, what was happening and what was going to happen if she allowed it to continue.

And then she had put her own knife in her chest.

That’s the part he’s trying not to remember. He still didn’t know who had started screaming, but she had hit the ground dead before they had even stopped. That was the thing about Dimara - she knew how to kill things. She wasn’t going to miss her own heart.

That’s why they’re standing in Riverside fucking Cemetery three days later, after all.

It’s not cold enough to snow yet. The air is bitter, frigid, and there’s rain drizzling down, but he’s barely felt any of it since they got out of the car. It was hard to feel anything like that when you were just that cold all the time, but that wasn’t it. He knew that wasn’t it. He wasn’t feeling anything because everyone else still was, a whole lot of things, and if he started allowing himself to feel them nothing good was going to come of it.

Blair doesn’t know why they’re here. Not here existentially, or anything. They’re here because she killed herself. It’s this cemetery, really. There’s probably a dozen options here and outside of Portland and they’re here. He has no recollection of anyone ever deciding on here, but this is the place. He had still been in that same, unfeeling stupor the day after when they had gone to file the police report and talk to someone at the funeral home and someone, the director or whoever, had asked him how they were planning on doing this. Cremation or straight-up burial.

Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t answered that one. He dug deep in himself and found nothing to give them that would qualify as a suitable response. Someone had. He thinks Nadir, because Celia was the only other person in their little group that anyone in that building would have looked at like a normal, rationally thinking adult, and she certainly wasn’t in that moment.

If he’s being honest, the only consistent thought floating through the voidless lump he calls a brain is that he wishes it would stop raining.

Not for his sake, of course. The rain doesn’t bug him. It’s making everybody else miserable, though, waiting for this ancient ass human being charading as a funeral conductor to finish his damn speech and dump the coffin down so they can all get on with it and go home, back to wallowing like they were before the real world made them come out here and do this the proper way.

Everyone’s miserable enough, is what he’s saying. The rain can piss off on making it worse.

They should’ve just put her in the backyard, a hundred feet away from the man they buried there a week ago. It would have been the same fucking result anyway.

The man finally stops droning on and on. He’s relieved at the silence, for once, at the complete lack of anything other than the rain still coming down. Well, and the occasional sniffle or sob or something else awful, but he’s gotten so used to that in the past three days that he barely hears it anymore.

"Can I go back to the car?" Kelsea asks, voice barely a murmur. She has yet to look up at him but she's shuffled closer, enough that it's clear he's intended to be the recipient of her question.

Of course she's asking him. Dimara's not here.

"Go ahead," he offers. "We won't be long."

He hopes, anyway. It looks like they're almost finished up with this anyway. Kelsea nods and departs with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, hair nearly plastered to her head. He's not well off enough in the newfound role of a deligator to make everyone bring umbrellas, apparently. That involves forethought. He's not there yet.

Before she's even made it to the car Vance has turned to follow her, but he bypasses the car entirely on his way up the hill, quickly turning towards the road leading to the main gate. Blair has been making decisions lately based on very little rational thought, and this one is no different. He just goes after him, leaving the sombre line-up at the gravesite smaller and smaller by the second.

He's hit the winding road by the time he snatches up his arm, pulling him away from any further progress.

"Can we not do this right now?" Vance asks. His voice sounds like Blair feels.

But Vance is different, worse than anyone else. In everyone else's grief they're either shutting down or screaming to the heavens. He has no such option; when he loses control of his emotions, he loses the humanity. He's been in and out of the house on a constant spin, human and then not, cleaning himself up only for him to disappear again two hours later. He keeps coming back with blood all over him, but it's his. Blair knows it's his. He's hurting himself in an attempt to regain control of it.

Blair doesn't think it's working. He's surprised to have had him human for this long today.

There's been a lot of self-infliction lately.

"Do what?" he questions.

"Any of this. I just want to go."

"Then get in the car."

"Not back to the house. Not with you guys. I need… I don't know, five fucking minutes, or maybe a few hours."

"Have you not been disappearing enough the past few days?"

"You know it's not the same thing," Vance says hoarsely. "You know that."

Blair wants to play the ignorance card and shove him in the car after Kelsea because he doesn't think Vance would fight him. He doesn't have the energy for it. He looks haggard, almost entirely sleepless, like he's human but with none of the things associated with it.

Which means he can't do it.

"Listen to me," he says, tightening his hand. "I don't care where you are, or what time it is. Call me later and I'll come get you."

"Don't think I can handle the rain?"

"I don't think anyone can right now. Just call me."

"I will." Vance stays put, patiently, until Blair lets go of his arm. He stares for a moment before he turns on his heel, starting for the entrance gate once again.

"You're really letting him go?" Celia asks flatly upon his return to the lineup. She's staring at a point on the horizon line instead of looking at the ground. Her hand in Rory's must be numb by now.

"Are you volunteering to stop him?" he asks. 

Celia says nothing. Nadir grabs his hand, too. It's just as painfully numb. Her other has a hold on Tanis as if she's afraid of someone else running.

"He shouldn't be going anywhere alone," Rooke asks quietly.

"Go with him, then," Celia says. He understands where the harshness in her voice is coming from. That doesn't mean he has to appreciate it.

"I can't. He's gone already."

Blair looks over his shoulder, but Vance has vanished already. Took off before Blair could change his mind, most likely. There's no going after him now unless he tracks him, and it's not the right thing to do.

He's not sure what is.

It just doesn't feel like there's a right answer anymore. There's a lot of wrong ones, more than he'd like. It's all bad.

There's good somewhere, he'd like to think. There has to be.

It's just not anywhere close right now.

—

—

—  
Being alone in the house for hours on end will always be one of the things that Rooke hates most.

He had gone only because Dimara had sounded so insistent; if Dimara was that confident in the fact that he could leave and they would soon follow, then it had to be something he could trust.

But it had been hours.

There was nothing for him to do except go back and the cowardice in his veins wouldn’t allow him. The landline was down. He didn’t have a phone of his own. All he could do was sit there patiently and wait, assuming they had cleaned up their mess and they were now on their way back.

They had been, turns out. But they came back with Dimara’s body, her own knife lodged in her chest.

There hadn’t been anything cleaned up at all.

Something in his brain still hasn’t clicked with the realization that she’s dead. You’d think it would be something he could relate to so easily. With most death he could, but this wasn't most death. This was Dimara and for some fucked up reason nine was eight and it just didn’t make any sense. 

He was the last one left standing by the open grave, though the others were all lurking beyond the car, waiting for him. They didn’t have to.

They would.

Kali’s still here, too. He doesn’t know who invited her or if anyone did; it seems very Kali-like that she found out the details and showed up without caring. It felt right, considering her reaction to the whole thing. He hadn’t been there for that either, but apparently it hadn’t been pretty.

She had shown up for Dimara and found her dead - nothing about that would ever be pretty.

The others who had come with her were long gone, though. One of her sisters, but not the other. He’s not sure why. The other two that had come along with her certainly weren’t blood related; one was the roommate, maybe. Dimara had mentioned her before. Rooke had no idea who the guy was, a hulking figure who had looked closer to tears than anyone his size had any right to. It was odd for him to have no knowledge of someone so openly emotional about it, but he didn’t care to ask. He didn’t care about much, really.

Her sister had left. The other two had gotten into a car not long after and followed. Rooke leaves the grave and heads back for the car when Kali’s stare lingers too long, as if she was about to come over. Everyone else piles in at his arrival, leaving a space for him behind the front seat.

By the time he closes the door behind him, Kali has already climbed into her car and taken off. It’s just them and a grave and the still drizzling rain.

“I’ve never been to a funeral,” he says, leaning his head against the window. It’s odd. He’s not sure he gets it.

“Congrats,” Celia comments idly.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Blair says.

“You don’t be an asshole,” she fires back. “We’re all aware you’re very good at it. Why did you let Vance go again, exactly?”

Blair clamps down on whatever he wants to say, for his benefit or everyone else’s. Celia’s been raring for a fight ever since and no one will give one to her. If punching someone in this car would solve her problems she would have done it by now.

He waits for something that doesn’t happen, for someone else to tell her to be quiet, or for Rory to interject, but he’s been staring blankly at the back of Rooke’s seat since Blair started the car and hasn’t done much else. It doesn’t look like he’s cried much today, but his eyes still have an eerily similar shine to them that says the very action isn’t far off. Eye, anyway. One of them has cracked open some, but only a centimeter or two. It’s been swollen shut since the knife nearly took it out.

Everyone in the car feels like a shadow of their former self. For someone like him that would be a fitting comparison; he only half-exists, after all.

“Do you think she’ll come back?” Kelsea asks quietly. “Like you?”

She’s talking to him, evidently. “Most things don’t come back like him,” Blair interjects, before he can begin to speculate.

“Asshole,” Celia mutters under her breath. At this point Rooke isn’t even sure who she’s talking about, if it’s a general word being used as a descriptor, if she’s referring to Blair or the thing that possessed her.

Not that it matters much. Both Blair and the aforementioned thing are both dead, one way or another. Calling them names won’t do anything.

“But we’re doing something, right?” Tanis asks. “Like we have a plan?”

Doing… something? He swivels in his seat to look at her. She’s got the unfortunate positioning of being stuck between Rory and Celia, and will be on the receiving end of the latter’s punch if she decides that now is the time.

One by one, everyone glances back at her. Even Blair stops at the edge of the main road and lets the car idle for a while.

That’s about the reaction Rooke would have guessed she'd get, if he could have guessed it at all.

Who could’ve guessed this?

—

—

—

“What?” Tanis repeats, looking around the car. 

“I’m sorry, do you have top secret necromancy powers that we don’t know about?” Celia asks wildly. “What the fuck are you even talking about?”

Tanis thought this was all abundantly clear, but even she’s beginning to doubt that now. Everyone is looking at her as if she’s just shattered their world and opened the crust of it up beneath their fragile little feet.

It all just feels a little dramatic.

“Is that… not why we just buried her instead of, you know—”

“Instead of what, incinerating her?” Celia questions. “You people on this fucking planet just love fucking with the balance of things. You can’t just bring someone back to life.”

“You don’t know how to do it,” Nadir says, directed at her. “I know you don’t.”

“Shirin does,” Rooke points out.

“Because I trust Shirin to bring her back to life.” Celia snorts. “You’ll do that over my dead fucking body.”

There’s a joke said aloud too soon. Rory closes his eyes - eye, whatever, and doesn’t allow it to re-open, taking a deep breath. In about three seconds Tanis is crawling out of this back seat and banishing Rooke back here instead.

“Parker said—”

“And what does Parker matter, exactly?” Celia interrupts.

Rooke ignores her. Risky move, but it might just pay off. “Parker said that he never did it right. If you make the proper sacrifices then I assume it could work just fine.”

“Except you’re dead, so it’s not like you can volunteer,” Celia sneers. It sounds too much like Blair asking her if she was volunteering to stop Vance in a more terrible way.

“What did I just say?” Blair asks.

“Don’t be an asshole, yeah, I heard you, Dad,” Celia mutters. “Dickhead.”

This is going south quicker than Tanis even thought possible. It’s easy to understand why everyone’s emotions are so volatile, but more difficult to comprehend them once they’re interacting and bouncing off one another in a closed environment.

“What if he could figure out a way to do it without anyone dying?” Rory asks. Finally, the one person Celia won’t turn on. She still gives him a look, but some of the fire dies from her eyes. Tanis sinks lower in her seat to allow her a better look. Right now it seems best to just be quiet now that she’s thrown the idea out there; let everyone mull it over and think of the possibilities. If there’s even the slightest of chances that they could get her back, Tanis wants to do it. Everyone else should feel the same way, if only it can be done without something else bad happening in its place.

Without someone else dying, really. Despite the growing urge to have her back Tanis knows damn well that Dimara wouldn’t want someone going in her place.

That’s why she did it. She had a second back to herself where she knew something awful had taken over her and was planning to do something with that. She took it out, and herself with it, to avoid any other ending.

She chose her own ending. It’s commendable, in a weird way. Definitely honorable. They were all falling apart and Dimara still chose them over herself.

Tanis just isn’t that selfless. She wishes she could be.

“So are we going, or not?” Nadir asks. Besides the initial question, she’s been quiet. Tanis doesn’t know if it’s everything or just one thing.

“Right now?”

“I don’t see why we wouldn’t, unless someone disagrees.”

Celia rolls her eyes and lets her head thunk into the window so hard Tanis expects her rock hard skull to break right through it. No one breathes a word. Rory still hasn’t begun to look around again, and Kelsea’s eyes are filling with tears again as if it’s hitting her for the hundredth time.

“If we’re going to, we need to do it before we lose her body,” Rooke says. Her body. Tanis is still flabbergasted by how much that little reminder alone can hurt her.

It’s just a body now.

He’s right, though. The longer they wait, the worse condition they’re going to face if they go through with it. Her body will start to go the longer they leave it in the ground. Will it still work then, if she’s a half disintegrated corpse, writhing with decay and maggots?

Will they even want it, then?

“Now’s good,” she agrees. Blair waits for something, a sign of assent or disagreement either way, but gets nothing save for Nadir looking at him over the middle console.

To think she was going to tell him, a few days ago.

Oh, how that was ruined.

They still haven’t moved from Riverside Cemetery’s gate, but Blair pulls from the drive and heads away from home. Towards the interstate.

It’s now, or never.

—

—

—

The thing is, Vance doesn’t even know if he wants to be alone.

He doesn’t mind being alone. He likes it, most of the time. It comes with the territory of being a painting major at MECA and wishing you could bash your own head in with a spare canvas before you got back to your work.

He had his people, but none of them were there. Emmett was down at Reed with his parents money and his excellent grades, stunning compared to three of them, and Aubrey and Pax had an apartment off campus from the University of Portland. Sure they saw each other on weekends, and they had breakfast together, sometimes, before early classes, but it wasn’t the same as before.

He didn’t mind being alone. Tavian was in and out of their room at increasingly weird hours and never appeared to sleep that Vance could tell, but there was nothing wrong with him.

And he probably had the room to himself now.

He’s not sure where the desire to be alone comes from now. He’s hardly interacted with anyone the past three days, sticking to the woods when he got too volatile and returning home to sleep for an hour and to shove food down his throat in record time before he got too tired to do so. Only the food is keeping him standing now. He has nothing else.

He wanders far, for too long, until his legs hurt and until the rain stops. He’s soaked through from before and has most likely ruined the cheap suit he rented from a nondescript place downtown under a fake name because he still hasn’t worked up the courage to use his real one. If he had gone back home in June he may have killed someone but there was no getting tangled up in this, no watching Dimara die, no having a wandering about, existential crisis.

It’s a long wander to boot. He ends up sitting on an empty bench in Deering Oaks Park just outside of downtown, but they’re all empty. The weather’s piss poor; no one with any sense is sitting out here. Even the duck pond is woefully empty of any ducks. There are a few unfortunate people running, slogging on through the rising mist as if their steps are all that matter. Maybe they do.

Vance wishes a step counter was his only problem right now.

Every person passing by him is giving him one of numerous looks: confused, peculiar, worried, unsure. Confused again, and again, and again. He is sitting out in the rain with a suit on, throat rapidly closing up, after all. Even he’s confused as to why.

He doesn’t have his wallet, his keys, his phone. He didn’t tell Blair that. He’s not sure how to go about calling him if it comes to that.

The truth of the matter is he didn’t think any of this through.

So, forcing his legs back several long miles back to the Cape it is, then. Even though he doesn’t want to.

“Oh my God.”

He blinks some of the lingering droplets from his eyes. For a second, the irrational part of his brain says it’s Aubrey, even though it sounds nothing like her and looks even less so.

But he does recognize her, the girl that was about to walk by him from the puddle-filled pathway on his left. It takes him a moment, but he does.

“You’re— you’re him, right?” she asks. “The guy from the shelter. The one who took off on me.”

That’s him, alright. He barely remembers doing it thanks to the bloodloss, but the moment is stuck in his brain. The newfound voice telling him to let a stranger help him, and him leaving anyway. Said voice has been oddly silent the past three days. Giving him space to grieve without intruding in his thoughts even though it already permanently lives there.

“That’s me,” he answers finally. She nods, and makes as if to sit down, but she’s bone dry tucked underneath her umbrella and he’s sitting on a soaked wooden bench, making the state of his clothes worse by the second.

“Are you okay?” she asks uncertainly. “Can I do anything?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? You’re not injured again, are you? Do you need me to call someone?”

“Not injured,” he informs her. It feels like he is, but that’s not the truth. He’s undecided on if he should make her call Blair or not. Would Blair even pick up?

She stares some more, and then finally sits down. She’s going to regret that move when the water soaks her through. He doesn’t even know who she is - she tried to help, once. It may not have been a bad idea to let her. But it could have been, too. He just didn’t know.

Is this his opportunity to find out?

“I don’t have any right to be worried, I don’t even know who you are,” she says, a nervous laugh tainting her words. “I just… I am. Sorta in my DNA, you know? Can’t help it.”

What a trait to have. This girl must be something like a saint, if not something better. In her spare time she volunteers at an animal shelter and offers to help bleeding or moping strangers sitting their sorry asses in the rain. It has started raining again, too. One point to the universe. Still a firm zero on his end.

And he still has nothing good to say.

“You do know who I am, though,” he says eventually.

“No, I don’t. I looked up the information you filled out after you took off and it turns out no one with that name even lives in the state,” she says. “And considering it seems like you do live here I’m going to assume it was all made up.”

“I don’t regret it. He’s a good dog.”

“Is he?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She smiles. He feels like he doesn’t deserve that. She even sticks out her hand in front of him. “Farren. Nice to meet you, I think.”

He takes it, even though his hand is frigid. She doesn’t even flinch. “Vance.”

“Is that a real name?”

“Sure is.”

“Good,” she repeats. “Great, actually. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“No. But you don’t have to worry.”

She stands up. He expects her to walk away. Most people would. Most people, as it turns around, are not as predictable as he once thought.

“Do you want to come back to my apartment with me?” she asks. “Even just to dry off. I have extra clothes. And leftovers in my fridge, I think.”

“Do you make a habit of inviting strangers into your house?”

“Not regularly.” She shrugs. “And considering we’ve met twice I don’t exactly consider us strangers.”

It’s an unfairly fair point. Though their meetings haven’t been anywhere near stereotypical, they’ve been true, and she’s at least making an effort about caring. She did that then, when she had no idea who he was, and she’s doing it now with the vaguest clue.

Vance waits for the voice to pop in with something, a nugget of intelligence or wisdom or stupid snark, but hears nothing the longer he waits. It’s left Farren staring at him for longer than he would have liked.

“How far is it?” he asks.

“Ten minutes. Is that okay?”

His legs are like lead, like stones have been tied to the bottom of his feet and someone pitched him into the ocean.

But ten minutes is better than several hours, and that’s what it will take him to get back to the house, to the grief, to the motions of suffering that every single person in there is making themselves go through over and over.

And Farren is smiling at him, and he’s an idiot.

So he agrees.

—

—

—

Tanis really fucking hates this house.

It has too many holes in the floor, for one. It’s got holes in the roof, too, and everything is vaguely damp because of it. She sort of hates everyone in it, too.

Getting Shirin means getting everyone else, too. Camden’s lurking about in the front hallway anyway and never leaves, clearly filled with some curiosity for the conversation at hand. Once they’re all congregated, relatively speaking, Isi materializes out of nowhere right in the middle of them all and spins in a slow circle, taking a long hard look around.

It hadn’t been pretty, to say the least. She had stopped once she had finally completed her look around, hands on her hips and said so, who died? Blondie or the werewolf?

Celia had almost put her fist through Isi’s face. Would have, if Blair hadn’t stopped her.

You could guess how well that had went, if you were even mildly intelligent.

Shirin at least looks like he’s putting some thought into what they’ve told him, an effort that he doesn’t seem to usually have. Halfway through him mumbling to himself and cutting back and forth through his options Parker creeps around the corner, head down and looking at them all like he just touched down from another fucking planet.

The basement might as well be.

“You sure we can’t kill anyone?” Shirin asks, a slight smile on his face. “That would be the easiest way.”

“Preferably not. Are there other ways?”

“Of course there are. They’re just not… guaranteed.”

“What do you mean?”

“You give up what you’ve agreed on, we go through the whole she-bang, and she stays dead.”

“And what are the chances of that?” Tanis asks, finally finding a voice. She’s sort of lost it, recently, for a good cause.

“It’s not exactly a statistic.”

That’s great. Imagine they go through all of this and Dimara just… doesn’t come back. It would be worse than just leaving her in the ground. Allowing yourself to hope often is.

“I’ll ask you, because I assume yours is already the worst,” Shirin says, turning to face Blair. “How attached are you to your soul?”

“Excuse me?”

“A soul is the closest equivalent to an actual human life. Taking one to bring someone back would theoretically be a big enough sacrifice; have to try it to find out. You may not be exactly the same afterwards, but hey, you’re the one that doesn’t want to die.”

“Not exactly the same?”

“Nefarious, malevolent, wicked, downright evil. Ungodly, soulless creatures are. They’re nasty.”

“That’s not an option,” Nadir says, leaving no room for discussion. Tanis learned long ago not to question her when she sounds like that, and besides, there’s enough in-fighting going on around them. They’re not the type to make that worse.

“It’s your best one.”

“Give us another.”

“What if it was just a bit of each of them?” Parker interrupts.

“What?”

Parker makes an odd gesture with one hand, the vaguest of things. He slices through the air a few times, continuing to cut through it as if he’s trying to make a point. If that’s the case, Tanis isn’t sure what the point is at all.

“Are you cutting a Thanksgiving Turkey?” Camden asks, sounding unbothered. “What the fuck are you doing right now?”

“A bit of each of them,” Isi repeats. For some reason, and Tanis probably, truly doesn’t want to know why, she sounds delighted. “A piece of the soul each.”

“That… might work, actually,” Shirin says. “If it added up correctly. There’s about as much risk as any other option.”

Tanis, in all her years of reading, has actually found things about this. Never did she focus on them; she never had any reason to. For her it was the occult and alchemy, the hidden rituals lost in the darkest folds of witch lore, the tombs no one could access anymore. All the bits and pieces that got her to where she is now, not even close to full potential.

She’s seen enough, though. She knows what happens when you lose it, and Shirin is right. Most of them, to put it nicely, go absolutely bonkers. The lucky ones live forever, impossible to kill save for a few select options.

Living forever might drive you insane anyway.

The prospect of living forever is terrifying. If she’s a prime specimen Tanis has eighty or so years, tops. It’s not likely that she’s making it that long with what she is.

She watches Shirin inform everyone else of that same thing, in words that are less kind and instead blunt. He never seemed like the type to beat around the bush, to be fair, but saying it all in such a way is having a visible effect.

“He’s cowering,” Isi announces. It’s not exactly rocket science to figure out what she’s going on about - Rory looks like he’s about to throw up. She doesn’t blame him. She’d be one of those very people giving up a normal lifespan, the humanity that comes with it. Nadir and Blair, Kelsea even, they already lost that. It’s not quite the same for everyone else. It’s not the same for her.

And Rory’s realizing that, looking more and more like he’s about to be sick.

She hopes that’s not the case.

“Shut the fuck up,” Celia snaps at her. “We’re not deciding this now.”

That, clearly, is directed both at Blair and at everyone in the room waiting for an answer. For someone so pig-headed about listening to him Celia is spending a lot of time making sure he knows exactly what she thinks.

“I never said we were,” he responds. For once his voice is calm, and that clearly does something for Celia’s nerves, shot to hell.

The progress is good.

“I’d need the body, anyway,” Shirin says. “And coming from me, I’d think about it. You do this, you fuck with your lives indefinitely. Consequences foreseen and unforeseen. For all any of us know this could fuck with your kid - you realize that, right?”

Tanis blinks. She realizes quicker than anyone else in the room save for Nadir, who gives her a wide-eyed, fearful glance over the top of Kelsea’s head.

There goes the progress.

The full magnitude of Shirin’s sentence has yet to hit anybody head-on. There are a few awkward seconds where everyone else looks at Kelsea as if she’s the kid, which is fair.

But she’s not the correct one.

“Oh, God,” Isi says, starting to laugh. “Does he not know? He doesn’t know, does he?”

She jabs a finger at Blair in the process. Both of Shirin’s eyebrows have raised so high they’ve practically disappeared into his hairline.

“Please no,” Camden says. “Tell me you didn’t.”

Tanis really does hate all of them.

Blair narrows his eyes at her. “What don’t I know?”

Isi tilts her head back, clapping her hands together as she continues on her quest to laugh as maniacally as possible, going so far as to wipe a few fake tears from the corners of her eyes. “This is great,” she manages. “This is fucking hysterical.”

Celia and Rory realize at about the same time why Nadir and Tanis have been staring at each other, dumb-founded, since it came out of Shirin’s mouth, and why Blair is still occasionally getting pointed at. Rooke is quick to follow, and he looks about as terrified as Nadir does.

Kelsea claps a hand over her mouth. There she goes.

That just leaves Blair, predictably. But he looks at Nadir, then, actually looks at her because everyone’s staring at the two of them, solely. The connection has finally started to form, the why. As all of the pieces start to slide together in his brain the last one gets closer and closer to fitting into place.

“Are you serious?” Celia asks, dumbfounded.

“Well, I’ll be taking my leave now,” Shirin announces, getting to his feet. “Think about it, let me know. And if we’re doing it, get her corpse out of the ground before it starts going all rancid, please.”

What a way to depart. Parker gives them all a look and scuttles out too. Isi has yet to stop laughing, but she crosses the room and pats Blair on the top of the head and nudges Camden, who is shooting them all such a foul look she’s surprised the venom in it hasn’t melted them all to the floor.

“This is the worst,” Camden informs them. “You’re the worst.” That’s directed at Blair, clearly. As if procreation and him in the same sentence is the most tragic thing to exist.

Tanis is going to hope it’s not.

They’re left alone, the seven of them. She doesn’t like that number much, as she’s coming to discover. It’s not right in any sense of the word.

The eighth secret is out, though. It’s really fucking out.

“Blair,” Nadir starts, concerned. It looks like he’s lost all function.

“We’re gonna go,” he announces. “Now.”

Everything in him is vacant. His eyes are fixed on nothing, his voice is hollow. To be frank, he sounds horror-stricken.

She’ll let him be that, because they don’t appear to have much of a choice.

No one puts up a fight about his words, not even Celia. And despite them all, despite how he’s been carrying on and watching over them all, he’s the first out the door on the way back to the car.

In reality, the progress is negative.

—

—

—

“I thought we were leaving!” Celia shouts after him.

Blair thought that too, to be fair. That’s exactly what he was saying, not in such words. They were supposed to leave.

He makes it to the door and makes no further progress, holding onto the handle for a long, useless thirty seconds before he backs up twenty feet down the road and then just stands there.

And stands there some more.

“He’s fucking broken,” Celia says, and then slams the door shut. She makes a face at him through the window when he glances at her.

Everyone gets in the car one by one, obediently even if they haven’t been told, leaving him twenty feet away from the car and Nadir ten from him, the only one left staring at him. He wishes she wouldn’t. He has the sudden urge, like Vance did, to be anywhere but here.

Yet now he has even more reason not to run.

He has more reason not to, christ alive.

“Is this real?” he asks. “Like, you’re actually—”

“Yeah. I was going to tell you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was going to,” she repeats. “Three days ago, after we got back.”

He stops. He hadn’t even realized he was pacing. All the plans were in place for him to find out, in the twilight hours, once everyone was long succumbed to sleep and in such a way that his brain didn’t fucking explode upon impact.

“It’s nowhere close to an excuse, but I couldn’t,” she continues. “Not after that. And the past few days I just couldn’t see a time where it would do anything but make the situation worse.”

“It’s not bad,” he says. “I don’t think. Is it bad?”

“I don’t think so either.”

“Okay,” he manages. “That’s good. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

He has no fucking clue, honestly. He hasn’t done anything wrong. Blair decides against sitting down in the middle of the cracked road, though it feels like he might want to. It might help the numbness that’s spreading through his extremities disappear some. That in itself could be attributed to a lot of things; today was just very numbing, in general.

It only got so bad in the past few minutes, though.

“I don’t know how we’re going to do this,” she says. “But I know that we can. I’ve been going over it the past week wondering, and I have no solution, but we can.”

“You believe that?”

“I do.”

“You heard what Shirin said.”

“I heard the possibility, not the guarantee. For all we know it has no effect at all if we go through with it. It’s different for us; we’re already technically immortal anyway. But the others…”

“I can’t ask them to do that,” he says, gesturing to the car. “Me, you, Kelsea… our normal lives are fucked away. But everyone else would be giving that up.”

“So we don’t ask them. We let them decide for themselves if they’re willing to. And if they are, then we try.”

That’s all they can do at this point. They can bring her back, even just the slightest maybe, but only at a cost. No one is willing to give up anyone’s life for good, but this is almost an equivalent regardless. It’s still losing a part of yourself that no one will ever get back.

Shirin may have been right about one thing, though - what effect will it have on him, really, when he’s already scheduled to live forever and has barely a soul to begin with?

None at all, really.

“How much damage can it do, really?” he asks. “It’s already going to be a fucked up little hybrid monster.”

“That’s your fucked up little hybrid monster you’re talking about.”

“Ours,” he corrects.

“Yeah,” she says softly. “Ours.”

Fucking hell. That’s about all he has left to say. Fucking hell, this is really happening and they’re really doing it.

“We are so stupid,” he tells her.

“Dimara’s going to kill us,” she says at the same time, lips quirking up. He can’t quite manage it, but he’s almost hysterical enough to begin laughing. It may just be a few days off.

It’s hard to get the lingering thought free from his head that this may not work at all, that in a few weeks time they’ll have to properly accept that there’s no coming back from this, that there’s a war looming and they’re not complete going into it. None of that’s right. The weight of it is a threatening force looming over his head, ready to drop at any second. Everyone else these past few days has been going through the motions, and what has he been doing? He’s been letting it happen. He’s been locking it all away.

“Come here, please,” Nadir says, holding out her arms. She folds them around him and he does the same back, nestling his head down into her shoulder.

This may just not work. It might not fucking work at all.

“She really is,” he mumbles, and Nadir nods. How are they supposed to do this without her, when it just got more complicated?

They need her, and the reality is they may not be getting her back. They may be fucking themselves for eternity for nothing and while everyone else may be happy living a lie, believing in something that might not necessarily come true, he’s not that person.

He can’t believe it so easily. He wishes he could.

The truth is, right now, she’s gone. And until she’s standing in front of him, alive once again, he’s not going to believe in an alternative. Hoping for the best and never watching it come true can destroy anybody.

And it’ll destroy him, if he allows himself to go there.

—

—

—

Vance wakes up alone in an empty apartment.

There’s a cat sitting on the opposite armrest, staring at him. She lets her tail flop over his feet when he twitches them towards her.

On the fridge across the room there’s a bright yellow post-it, something not there the night before. He knows because even in his dazed stupor he had enough sense to make note of every little thing in here, just in case.

Across it is CLASS FROM 10-4 in thick, black letters. They’re unfairly neat.

So Farren, apparently. It’s just after ten. Alongside letting random strangers, or close to it, inside her apartment at all, she’s apparently inclined to let them sleep over on her couch, too. She had offered the spare bedroom, just after midnight. He had refused on the grounds that he was definitely not staying the night and had to return home, at some point.

When, as a matter of fact, had he even sat down on the couch? And when the hell did he fall asleep?

It’s just after ten, as he said. Apparently he needed it. 

But Farren’s left him alone in it, granting him a level of trust she wouldn’t give anyone, especially someone she doesn’t know. The few hours they spent talking last night aren’t enough, not when he learned more about her than she ever did him. He wasn’t willing. But he knows she’s in nursing at USM, that’s where she is now, and he knows that there are two more cats lurking about somewhere, all from that same shelter he ran from in August. She told him she lived alone here, but he’s not sure he believes it. She gave him spare clothes, after all, and they’re definitely not hers. They just about fit him perfectly.

No nursing student at USM just lives in a two-bedroom, fully made up apartment near downtown unless they’re loaded or not entirely truthful about it.

The cat at the end of the couch meows at him, and then waltzes all the way down the top ridge until she’s sitting above his head. Delilah, if he remembers correctly. By far the nicest one. The other is asleep on a dish towel next to the kitchen sink, and the third is still missing. Apparently he doesn’t like people very much.

Vance can relate to that right about now.

He should leave. It’s sensible. There’s no landline, so he can’t call Blair, but he could start walking, or see if there’s any spare change hidden in the couch to make use of a payphone.

The thought of even stealing lost change out of her couch makes him feel bad.

If someone else comes back, though, that’s not going to be good. What if they don’t even know he’s here and they just walk in? He sits up to glance out the window at the fire escape, and then gets up and rushes to the door like he owns the place.

It’s already locked. She must have done it behind her on the way out.

If a stray roommate or anyone at all is coming, he’ll hear them. He’ll flee out the window before he lets someone else mess with him.

Until then, what is he supposed to do? That’s nearly five hours until she gets back, if he feels inclined to stay until then, and that’s if she comes back right away. Why is he waiting for her, anyway? He doesn’t actually know her.

It sort of feels like he’s starting to, and she’s a good person. Maybe he’s staying because he’s convinced he’s safe here.

Just in case, he unlocks the door and then re-locks it again. It makes him feel better.

He has to do something, even if it’s not over-the-top important. His brain is already halfway there to clawing at his skull. He’s had a headache for days, the pressure behind his eyes almost too much to bear. Even sitting alone in the quiet too long will get him thinking about things he can’t afford to think about, too little blood for a dead body, the stillness of a ruined front yard and the sliver of a moon overhead.

A part of him, most of him really, is still stuck out in the woods of the past few days, roaming and unable to stop. It was all back to a cycle again except this one was unpredictable. He had no idea what would set him off, what emotion would grow too volatile and force him out of his human body.

He feels bad for rooting around Farren’s apartment unsupervised, but he has a game plan. It’s very small, very simple, and it’s good enough for his frazzled head.

He’s going to befriend everything that moves in this apartment.

Delilah already seems to like him well enough. She’s still perched on the top of the couch when he returns, stretching her head forward to allow him to scratch at it.

There’s a joke to be made here, about dogs and cats getting along.

At least someone likes him.

Millie, the one on the counter, is more difficult. He stands there for so long in front of her to no avail and eventually turns the television on solely for background noise while he works on gaining her attention. She looks completely uninterested - bored, even.

She’s very much interested in the bag of treats he finds in the one of the cupboards overhead; she eats two off the counter and a third directly from the palm of his hand. After that she seems much more inclined to show him any signs of affection; when he puts the treats away she leaves just as fast, but after that at least seems more content to spend time around him.

It takes him so long to find the third that several other things happen first. He accidentally falls asleep on the couch again, for nearly an hour, the television droning on beyond him. He stands in the bathroom for over five minutes certain the cat isn’t in there but unsure of where else to go. In the process of debating it he eats the smallest granola bar he can find in the cupboard, unwilling to take anything else.

The spare bedroom looks mildly lived in. There are posters on the wall, but the corners have begun to peel up, and it doesn’t look as if the bed has been touched in quite some time. There’s no little in the way of personal belongings that there’s nowhere for a cat to hide.

He feels… guilty, going through her room, for some reason. It’s not like he’s snooping. It’s meticulously made-up and thoroughly cleaned for someone who spends so much time, evidently, elsewhere, busy as can be.

Vance allows himself a quick look around, mostly for any important or worrying details. The only thing to look at, really, is the photos. There’s a few on the wall, family by the looks of it, and several more of her and some unrecognizable guy, alongside one a few years younger that looks related to him. Brothers, maybe. Vance wouldn’t even know left from right currently, so it’s the best guess he’s got.

There’s just a lot of pictures of them is all. It seems odd that there’s literally no chance that one of them isn’t going to walk in unannounced, key in hand.

He’s wearing someone’s clothes, after all.

It’s impossible, even.

He discovers the third cat, grizzly and one-eyed and beyond pissed off, underneath the bed. He’s tucked himself precisely dead center where Vance can’t reach him no matter what angle or side he tries from, and the cat hisses at him whenever his hand gets remotely close.

Farren probably took him because no one else was going to. Vance can’t imagine he takes kindly to strangers.

And now he’s relating to a cat.

He lies prone on the floor, waiting, and gets nothing for it. The cat stares at him, undoubtedly perturbed, eyes narrowed to angry little slits.

The skittering behind him causes him to look away. There’s a cage perched on a small wooden stand tucked behind the door - he hadn’t even noticed it on the first go around. A rodent is leaning against the cage’s walls, stretched up all the way as far as its little body can go.

“How in the world have you not been eaten yet?” he asks, getting to his feet. The rat continues to chatter on, as if excited to have finally discovered a human in its midst. Vance puts a finger against the cage’s edge and the rat nibbles for a moment before darting off, back to a piece of half-eaten carrot in the opposite corner. It’s beady, dark little eyes continue to watch him even then.

“We’re really in the funny farm now, aren’t we?” he asks. It feels like he ought to be, if he isn’t already. With how bad his head is, someone either needs to look him up in the clink before he goes berserk or put him in a straightjacket. Whatever’s easiest.

The rat drops the carrot and chatters at him again. “I know, I’m insane,” he says flatly. “You don’t have to—”

Something shatters in the outside room.

“Oh shit,” the voice announces, and he jolts, both feet nearly leaving the ground. He’s not sure what startled him more - the noise, or the voice’s sudden reappearance after so many days of eerie silence.

“What?” he asks, but the rat certainly doesn’t know what’s going on, and it’s not as if the voice is ever actually helpful. Vance inches back to the door. Neither of the other cats come running. If someone had come into the apartment, he would have heard it, right?

Maybe not. He’s not in his right mind. He’s just not good at anything anymore.

He eases out in the hall, prepared to run. There’s not many places to go. The door is still shut, lock still in the same position. There’s a glass shattered on the floor beneath the sink, and Millie is steadily picking her way towards the mess, sniffing curiously.

“Hey, go away,” he urges, and she darts back behind the coffee table. Delilah still hasn’t moved.

There’s nothing wrong, inherently, except for the broken glass at his feet. His memory is unreliable at best, but that glass had to have been on the drying rack before it fell. It’s not like the cupboard opened itself. Still, it should have hit the counter and stopped before it got anywhere close to the edge.

The door opens. Vance nearly steps right in the glass he whirls around so fast.

He didn’t even hear the lock move, and his senses are reliable right now? Apparently not.

Farren stops half a foot inside the doorway, glancing around curiously. Her eyes finally find his face. She’s got a backpack slung over one shoulder and two plastic bags in her opposite hand.

“It wasn’t me,” he announces. She looks over the glass at his feet.

“Okay then,” she says slowly. “I… I didn’t think you’d still be here.”

Oh God. That’s embarrassing. Was he supposed to have left? Any sane person would have.

Vance hasn’t exactly been sane as of late, though.

“Be careful, please,” Farren says, placing the bags down on the counter. “I’m going to get a broom.”

She departs down the hall, and both cats go trotting after her, meowing up a storm. He, to his credit, stays put and avoids a shard of glass in the foot. Instead he focuses on the two bags she placed on the counter, both full of hot food.

“You thought I’d still be here,” he calls after her. She returns a few moments later, broom and dustpan in hand.

“I’ve always been told I’m a bad liar,” she informs him. She hands him the dustpan, and he stays in place while she sweeps up the glass from around him into a neat little pile two feet away, far from his feet.

“It wasn’t me,” he repeats. 

“I believe you.”

“I— what?”

“I believe you,” she says again, reaching for the dustpan. She discards all of the glass shards in a spare plastic bag and ties it off, tossing the whole thing into the garbage can beneath the sink.

“Why?”

“Because weird things and weird people just do,” she says simply. It sounds like she knows the secrets to the entire universe based on that sentence alone. It would be worth it to ask her for just a few answers, to even beg them out of her.

It’s safe to move now, but Vance finds he can’t.

“You’re not human, are you?” he asks.

“No. Are you?”

She really is a bad liar. “Why are you asking when you already know?”

Farren’s responding smile could do actual wonders to light up entire rooms, followed by an exasperated shake of the head, as if even she is lost to the wonders of lying and why she asks such futile questions. She’s known for a while, then, possibly since she found him in the park. Hell, before that? She found him gushing blood in the doorway of an animal shelter with dozens of previous scars alongside it, and he took off without getting any help.

Humans don’t just survive that.

Her smile fades, some, but it’s still lingering when she navigates around him. She picks up both plastic bags, one in each hand, and dangles them in front of him.

“So,” she says. “Thai or Mexican?”

—

—

—

Everyone else is finally asleep for once.

The thought comforts Rooke like nothing else has been able to. Everyone else, unlike him, needs a solid bit of sleep every now and again, even Blair despite him acting otherwise. They may not be getting the regular eight hours, but it’s good enough.

He didn’t need to. He could stay up and keep Bagel company, who hasn’t been getting nearly enough attention lately with everyone wallowing about. He was also, in a roundabout way, hoping for Vance’s return. Blair had been uneasy all last night when he hadn’t returned to the house, and then to make matters worse they had found his phone upstairs.

It was going to get ugly when everyone awoke and discovered that he was still gone.

Rooke just tries to keep himself busy. He takes Bagel outside and sticks close to the house despite the fact that no one can see it, anyway. He considers making breakfast but decides against it; the fire alarm is no way to wake everyone up.

And then, in a split second decision, he calls Kali.

No one else has. No one else would. Even he doesn’t feel right doing it, but his options are limited and they still have Dimara’s phone. It’s easy to leave a voicemail just shy of five in the morning and then hang up when his words are no more.

She deserves to know.

She must think so too, because she shows up at the door just before eight.

Rooke isn’t necessarily surprised to see her; the speed is unnerving, but hunters are just that in general. Bagel, however, is thrilled to see her, and pounces on her legs the second Rooke opens up the door.

“You’re seriously bringing her back?” Kali asks.

“We… we don’t know,” he explains. “We might. And even if we do it might not work.”

“Do you need something from me?”

“No.”

“Then why did you call me?”

“Do you think you only ever get calls when someone needs something from you?”

“It feels like it,” she says. “Lately it feels like I only exist in someone else’s phone to serve them whenever they need a job done. You have no idea how existence feels when you’re barely living it.”

“You know I’m dead, right?” he asks. “And you think I don’t get that?”

“Dimara called me for back-up.”

“She called you because she wanted you there.”

“You’re speaking for her now?”

“Someone has to,” he says. “You’re not here just to talk circles around the fact of her death. It’s eating you alive the same way its doing to everyone else.”

“Is it?”

“Is what?”

“Is it eating you alive?” she asks. “You’re dead, remember?”

He’s never had something thrown back in his face so quickly. There’s little explanation to the feeling otherwise. His insides are… hollow. Constantly spinning on an axis and bumping up against one another until he feels turned inside out, upside down. Rooke hasn’t felt right since the day he died, but this is worse.

“Why are you here? You’re here because you want her back too,” he says. “I know that.”

“Do you know what she did?” Kali questions.

“Something bad.”

“My cousin killed himself in August. So they said. But she was there when it happened and he ended up with a broken neck on our back patio and I don’t think he went willingly. I know he didn’t go willingly. He wasn’t like that. Whatever else happened, she was there and he died because of it.”

“And?”

“And that doesn’t change anything for you? About bringing her back?”

“Why would it?” he asks. “I didn’t know him. I’m sorry it happened but I will never know him. I know Dimara, though, and whatever happened… she didn’t want it to. You believe that as much as I do. So if you’re not here because you want her back, then why are you?”

“Because I love her?” Kali says, the sentence uplifting into a question that sounds more uncertain than he knows she would like.

Because love is weird. Love does things to you that you don’t expect. It drove his family far, far from this house and it got his brother killed, eventually. It killed Dimara too, her love for them outweighing her love for herself.

Because she knew what she had done, and what she would continue to do.

He’s an awful person, and maybe that’s the infection inside him from months ago still lingering, but he’d rather the awful version of her, too, over the dead one.

“Did you ever tell her that?” he asks.

“No,” she replies. “And it’s not like it matters now, anyway. Even if you get her back I don’t know how we’re supposed to do this.”

“One day at a time,” he tells her. “When we get her back, that’s all you can do.”

Kali nods, lower lip caught between her teeth, eyes watering. The genuine human interaction these past few months has done him good, and sometimes bad, but he still doesn’t have it in him to reach out and hug her.

It’s the reaction he’s scared of. He knows what he’s capable of - it’s her in this fragile moment that worries him.

Pushing this issue will get either of them nowhere.

“Are you sure you don’t need anything from me?” she repeats, eyes still stuck on the ground.

“No. I’ll keep you updated.”

“Preferably from someone else’s number,” she says, slightly under her breath, taking three backwards steps down the stairs.

“Not exactly a good way to be woken up?” he guesses. A flash of Dimara’s name across her phone’s screen, his voice on the other end instead.

“Not exactly,” she agrees. “Let me know.”

“I will.”

He stops Bagel from following her all the way back to the car, crouching down to loop a finger in his collar. He settles between Rooke’s bent legs, tail still flopping about.

“Kali,” he calls after her, watching her pause by her open door. “Can you keep an eye out for Vance?”

Not what she was expecting, surely. It’s hard to meet people’s expectations these days.

There’s no telling where he’s gone, no way to track him now that it’s been so long. At least with Kali permanently stationed in the city and them all the way out here there’s a chance that between them they’ll spot him, at least once.

That’s if Vance wants to be found, anyway. He knows the feeling all too well.

Kali nods, departing in silence. Only when the car disappears does Bagel’s tail stop wagging.

If the dog trusts in her, why can’t he?

That’s what Rooke’s sticking with, anyway. With the inevitable coming he thinks they can use every possible ally out there, no matter what side they were on to begin with.

Those sides are going to be blown to shit soon, anyway.

No one else may believe that, but he does.

Someone has to.

—

—

—

So Vance becomes friends, or something like that, with a banshee.

Yeah, that’s right. A fucking banshee.

All the old wives tales always said they were hundreds of years old and ugly as hell, and Farren is decidedly not either, unless she’s hiding something from him. She’s not remotely scary, and says nothing of the sort either.

After she tells him, openly and without shame, he waits, but never gets the question back. She never asks what he is, what’s wrong with him.

Vance never finds himself opening his mouth to tell her though, either, and maybe that’s why. She’s making no move to crack him open and go rooting around inside him, and that’s probably for the best. He’s in a state best described as fragile; one crack and he might tumble apart into a thousand pieces.

She doesn’t go digging, so he finds himself doing it instead.

“So who’s that guy in those pictures in your room?” he asks

Not to fucking pry, or anything. Way to go Vance.

Farren’s first look is bemused, as if realizing that he was not directly snooping through her things while she was gone but at least poking around enough to notice.

The second look is something else. Sad.

He regrets it immediately.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says hurriedly. “I was just wondering.”

“Spending lots of time in my room, are we?”

“I was talking to—”

“The rat, I’m aware,” she says, but some of the amusement comes back to color her tone, relief settling over him at the sound of it. The rat whose name is Hennessy, apparently, except Farren didn’t name it that and he can’t imagine anyone at a public animal shelter parading around things named after alcohol.

Being nosy, it turns out, is not a crime. It should be.

“My boyfriend,” she says finally. Vance had given up by that point, turning his attention back to the television. “And his little brother, in case you were wondering about that too.”

“And you’re sure they don’t live here?” he questions, gesturing vaguely to the clothes he’s wearing.

“Positive.”

She says nothing else. He looks back to the television again, and so does she. She hasn’t mentioned any of this yet, not in the…

He doesn’t even know how many days it’s been. Too many. He should have gone back by now.

“He died in August,” she says.

“Who?”

“My boyfriend,” she responds. She swallows. Something hardens in her face. “And because I’m not legally old enough to adopt him they shipped Declan off to Presque Isle to live with an uncle he doesn’t even know. I told him when he turns eighteen in January he could come back here, and I think he’s going to.”

The spare bedroom, the one with the posters on its wall and the still-made bed. That’s why it still looks the way it does.

Like he said previously - he’s under a roof with a saint.

“I’m sorry,” he says. There’s really nothing else to say. Everyone at the stupid funeral home kept saying the same thing to all of them like the words really meant anything.

The words taste foul coming out of his mouth.

“I never even felt anything,” she says quietly. “When it’s someone I know, in the past I’ve always felt something. The smallest blip to that stereotypical scream. Comes with the territory. But when he died I felt nothing. They called me at the shelter and told me I needed to come down to the station and I thought oh god, who did what now? and nothing bad after that. So I went down there, because I had to, and someone took me into a room and he said he was going to show me a picture. And I was laughing, you know, and then he started describing it to me. Said he didn’t want me to be shocked by it.”

Her breath hitches, and then so does his, because in this fragile state if she starts crying he’s bound to follow. All this talk of death is almost enough to tip him over the edge without it. He’s felt that way for days, hanging on the edge of a freefall.

He feels like he’s bracing himself for impact with no idea what he’s even landing on.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said this outloud,” she says thickly. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s okay.”

“It’s just stupid, you know. Everyone has all these abilities and they never work when they’re supposed to. He showed me the picture and it was him, but it wasn’t. He was covered in blood and all distorted and they asked me for confirmation. Said “you were his last contact and his ID says Casper Tolson, is that correct?” and you want to know what I said? I said no. I didn’t believe him. And I didn’t until I got home that night and no one ever came home after me.”

She’s not crying. She should be. Vance would be bawling his eyes out right now if he was her, unable to hold back any longer. Everything has been so raw these past few days and when he came across her in August they were the same for her, too. Raw, open, bleeding wounds, same as the ones on his chest.

She must see the same things in him that she saw in herself. Is that why she hasn’t asked? Farren has to know something is up, regardless of the details. She can, after all, recognize the signs of death not long past when she sees them.

Farren smiles at him, then. For all the secrets she’s given up he feels like he doesn’t deserve that.

“One day I think everything will be good,” he says. “And we’ll all be okay.”

She’s three months out and still holding onto the misery, tucking it down inside her. He’s less than a week. If he believes that she can get through it, then that means he thinks the same thing about himself.

Does he believe that?

She’s still smiling, faintly. “Thanks,” she murmurs, and turns her attention to her phone before he can respond. He leans back against his side of the couch and lets her go about her business, easing his legs away from Delilah’s still stretching, furry body. She stretches even further between them when he moves.

It’s hard to focus. He can see one of her fingers swiping away, through photos and occasionally a video, a stray headphone popped into her left ear, listening away.

Photos like the ones in her room, videos as memories, the only ones she gets to keep.

And then, predictably, she excuses herself to the bathroom, leaving her phone balancing on the cushion top.

No one leaves their phone unattended except a saint.

“You shouldn’t be so nosy,” the voice says, half a second before he even moves. It knows him better than he knows himself these days.

“Eat shit,” he mutters, and barely hears a muffled rude in response as he scoops up the phone. It’s paused three seconds into a video and the frame in question is blurry, a moving object, but unmistakably Farren and most definitely Casper.

He presses play, listening for the sound of the bathroom door re-opening. Someone is laughing in the background, unrecognizable.

Farren turns the camera around to Casper, and evidently, being nosy is a crime.

Casper speaks.

Time slows in that stereotypical stop-start motion. He pauses the video without blinking and drags it back to the start, replaying those few seconds. Casper speaks again. He stops it.

“I told you not to be so fucking nosy,” the voice chimes. The voice. It. He.

Casper?

Casper.

“Vance?” Farren asks. He jolts; the phone falls from his hand, rips the headphone free from his ear, and tumbles to the floor. Delilah wisely flees the scene.

Farren stares at him from the hallway judgement-free, unperturbed by him snooping through her phone. Of course she is. He knows how she is by now, and she would never get angry with him for that.

It would be nice if she did. It would make his reaction more appropriate.

“You need to calm down,” the voice says. It’s not just a fucking voice anymore, it’s—

“That’s Casper, alright,” Farren says quietly, and he flinches before she reaches down for the phone, not quite addressing him at all. He can’t breathe. His heart is thundering away in his chest, threatening to crawl into his neck, stifling all the air from his lungs. Every thought in his head had congealed, refusing to peel away from one another like some great big soupy mess.

This was a fucking mess.

“If you hurt her,” Casper starts. Casper’s in his fucking head, or living around him, dead but still somehow here, clinging to this side of the world and refusing to let go.

Vance realizes, belatedly, that two claws have broken free from his skin at his left hand and he’s subconsciously hidden them, digging into the palm of his hand. It’s already bleeding.

“I have to go,” he announces, and makes a beeline for the door.

“What?” Farren asks. He slams the door shut behind him in the hall without responding.

His hand is trailing blood by the time he gets to the ground floor and crashes through the entrance doors. His momentum nearly takes him into the street. There are more claws coming out, more rivulets of blood. This is exactly what kept happening at the house when his emotions got out of control. A shift, a change. Human again. Barely keep himself alive. Do it all over again three hours later when the grief threatened to crush him.

Oddly enough, this feels like grief, too.

“I was trying to talk to her, you know,” Casper helpfully informs him. “I was talking to her that day in the shelter. You heard me instead. You were the only person that had ever heard me.”

“Why?”

“Why are you fucking asking me? I’m dead.”

“Thanks,” he spits, rounding the corner. There’s nowhere to go. There’s no forest, nowhere to hide in this fucking stupid city. He peels off into the alleyway instead, turning around the nearest dumpster.

“You’re bleeding a lot,” Casper comments idly. He’s got all ten now, shredding both his hands open like tissue paper.

Like he said. Fragile.

“Shut up,” he replies.

“I’m just saying—”

“Shut the fuck up,” he insists. “I don’t want you in my head anymore. Get out.”

“No one else can hear me.”

“Then fucking find someone else!” he shouts. “I don’t fucking care who can and can’t hear you, find someone. I can’t do this anymore. You’re driving me insane, do you understand that? I can’t handle this anymore, I’m going—”

Vance trips over a pile of garbage next to the alley.

He’s going to the ground, apparently.

He hits the concrete with a thud, catches half the claws sprouting out of his fingertips on it, and then stays there after he scrapes both his face and nose open too, followed by his knees before he finally comes to a complete and total stop. He’s a broken car that keeps trying to run red lights, not listening to any dumb laws, nor to the person driving. His brain isn’t being listened to anymore.

“Vance!”

He can’t hurt her, too. He’s hurting himself enough.

When he’s like this everything snaps into full perspective. He knows exactly where she is and how many steps away she is, can feel her even when she crouches down by his side, half a foot away. She doesn’t have a single hand on him. Everything inside him is shifting, trying to change. Trying to come out.

“Vance,” she says again, quieter. She sounds sad again.

“Go,” he manages. “Please.”

“It’s going to be okay.”

It’s not. His palms have been whittled down to nothing, no skin left to rip into, nothing but blood staining the concrete. He drags a hand through his hair instead and digs in, until he feels skin being pierced. Blood flows from his scalp and down, over his ears.

“You need to stop hurting yourself,” she says.

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

He’s hurt himself so much. It’s the only thing that stops it.

It’s better him than anyone else.

Farren shuffles closer, and he’s slowing down, too out of his mind to wrench away and stop her. Casper was right - he’s losing a lot of blood. It’s making everything foggy. When she puts a hand on his back he barely reacts, save for tightening his hand into his own scalp. More blood runs.

He wants everything to stop hurting. It’s too much of it, all the time. Just when he thinks he’s done some outside force comes in and tells him to start again.

He can’t tell if it’s blood anymore, or if he’s crying. There’s hardly a difference.

“One day everything will be good,” she says. His own words repeated back to him sound like a farce. He never should have said them.

Vance shakes his head. It doesn’t matter much, he doesn’t think. He’s probably dying. It feels like he is.

“It will be,” she murmurs. “I promise.”

It’s just a promise. What’s a promise from a saintly half-stranger who trusts him more than he trusts her? What’s a ghost living in his head, gone silent?

None of it matters, not when the weight of his own body is slipping away.

The last thing he thinks before he blacks out is I really should have called Blair.

But nothing matters, right?

Least of all that.

—

—

—

He got everyone to sleep last night.

For this one, to Rooke, everything is different.

Everyone has retreated, that’s for sure. Very few of them are asleep. One or two at the most, if he had to make an optimistic guess.

Individual rooms have become safe havens, but they’re not all being used. There’s a clear, divisive split. Kelsea is alone and asleep. He thinks Nadir might be, too. Blair unlikely. The other three, though, are all tucked away upstairs regardless of whether or not they belong there.

It’s the three with the real stakes in all of this, judging by their resounding silence when he cracks open the door and shuffles three inches in.

Celia fixes him with a glare. “Private meeting. Invite only.”

Rory sighs. Tanis pats the space on the floor next to her as if she ignored Celia’s words the second they started to pour from her mouth.

He sits down. Celia presses fingers into both of her closed eyelids and lets out a breath that comes from the deepest part of her.

When you’ve got a normal, not really human lifespan at hand, giving that up is terrifying, he imagines. It’s not like he got a choice in his. He didn’t willingly didn’t give up his life, didn’t ask to come back like this either. These three will be giving that up knowing they are, and Vance too, but Vance isn’t here right now. Vance could be dead for all they know, next in line on things they need to bring back.

“I’ll do it,” Rory says, a minute later.

“I’m not sure you’re thinking clearly about that,” Celia insists.

“So what if I’m not? I don’t care.”

“You’ll care when you’re still alive in two hundred or so years with nothing better to do than wish you weren’t.”

“If we’re all doing it then we’ll all still be here,” he points out. “I’ll have all of you.”

Tanis sighs so bodily she nudges into him, still spread out across the floor. “We’re going to be the supernatural Brady Bunch.”

“What?” Rory asks. Celia swats at him until he stops looking so confused.

Her being the one so vehemently against this makes sense, but it also doesn’t. She’d know better than anyone about the trials and tribulations of being dead and not, but she’s also morphed into a completely different person since. There are two sides warring - she wants Dimara back just as much as the rest of them. Maybe more.

She also knows the ugly details, the consequences that could arise.

Rooke continues fiddling with the edge of his sweater, with what he has tucked into the side pocket. He’ll have to let Dimara buy him things more, if this all works. It’s nice to have hidden pockets.

“I’ll do it,” Rory repeats. “I want to.”

“You know damn well if he’s doing it you are too,” Tanis says to Celia. “Don’t act otherwise.”

“And you’re okay with outliving your parents?” Celia asks back. Tanis shrugs, keeping her mouth shut. She probably isn’t, but that’s the choice they’ve been left with.

If this is the path they’re headed down, maybe it would be wise for him to get the hell out of here and go find Vance. He has no idea where to even start looking. His phone has pinged with a few texts, but none that give anything away. By the looks of it, he’s not with any friends. Parents, then? He’s not sure where else Vance would go. In any case, they need to find out.

Celia and Rory’s muffled conversation dissolves into yet another slightly heated discussion, where Rory closes his eyes and tries to breathe evenly through it all.

Tanis nudges him until he stops fidgeting. “What do you have in there?” she asks. The shape of it is too bulky to hide properly, especially when it’s moving about so much.

When he doesn’t respond she shoves her hand in his pocket until his falls away, curling her fingers around the glass. She frowns.

“I took it from the house,” he explains. Celia shoots him another look, but either doesn’t care or doesn’t hear before she turns back to Rory.

Tanis pulls back the edge of his pocket until she can see it, properly, but doesn’t remove it. “It feels different.”

“I know.”

That’s why he took it. It had been any other room, desolate and cold, and there had been an hourglass on the windowsill, clear and reflected in the moonlight through the window save for it’s wooden base. There had been nothing peculiar about it to anyone else, but he could feel it the same way Tanis said it. The difference. It was like a charge, like there was bottled lightning in there, electricity that never seemed to stop nor start.

And that was magic, even if sometimes he didn’t know what magic was.

It was something else, too, the way the dark sand inside it would shift even when it was laid flat on a table. And it was always when he got close to it, fingers centimeters away.

It knew death when it felt it, the way they all did.

Tanis removes her hand, looking thoughtful. She turns her eyes to the ceiling.

Says nothing at all.

Rooke isn’t sure what to say either. There’s something to figure out, but he hasn’t been able to put his finger on it.

He shouldn’t have taken it. Dimara had told them not to.

Dimara wasn’t here, though, and Charles Clearson, or whomever, already knew he was still here.

So what did it matter, really?

—

—

—

Vance wakes up with his hands bandaged. He’s back on the couch.

Neither of which are things that should have happened, theoretically speaking. He was on the ground, outside, and his hands were torn open. He should still be there.

Everything hurts, vaguely. Every inch of space on his hands has its own individual pulse and his head is throbbing, making opening his eyes all the way more difficult. It’s the apartment again, but half the lights are off. It’s still dark. A few hours or a full day. He can’t tell.

Farren is still here, though. He knows she is.

He eases himself up, eyeing the door, and she’s back in the living room before he can even blink. That hurts, too.

“Take it easy,” she says.

It hurts to move his hands. It’s only been a few hours, or they would have been fully healed by now. The bandages aren’t too thick, expertly wrapped, curled between his fingers and pinned tonight. They’re not going anywhere.

He needs to not be here. He knows that, Casper knew it, Farren still does if she dragged him back up here somehow in the first place. At this point it doesn’t matter where, it just has to be elsewhere. Anywhere if it’s safer.

He stands, waiting for the dizziness to pass, and heads for the door again. Farren stepping in his path is too much, and he has nothing in him to get around her.

Nothing in him is functioning. It feels like his insides have disintegrated into ash. He waits for her to move, but she stays put, resolutely so, looking up at him.

“Take it easy,” she repeats, more forcefully. “If you need to go somewhere—”

“I need to go,” he says. His voice sounds awful, like he’s been clawing at his own throat in his sleep.

There’s nothing wrong with it.

“I can take you somewhere,” she says, and he shakes his head. “Anywhere. I don’t care. Just tell me.”

He won’t let her. He needs to get the fuck away from her, not sit in a car with her and drive all the way back up to the Cape in the passenger seat, trying not to cry. His head is empty and silent. He hates it and didn’t realize he would.

“Where do you need to go?” she asks. She sounds so earnest. She’s also going to hate him if she ever finds out.

It’s three months out, she’s moving on, she’s living without him. How can he ruin that?

He’s going to.

“I need your phone,” he says instead, and she hands it to him without question. He clutches the wall with one hand, struggling to find any grip with the bandages, and dials the number with the other, willing himself to stop shaking. It doesn’t work.

It’s a miracle he remembers the number at all and stays on the line as it rings and rings and rings. He didn’t look at the time, but it must be the middle of the night.

The time doesn’t matter, when he hears the line click.

“Blair,” he says, steadying his voice for the last time. It doesn’t feel like his lungs are properly working. They’ve gone away with the rest of his insides, at least one of them. There’s no cause for this otherwise that he can think of. 

“Of course,” Blair says. “Of course three fucking days later you think trying this is the appropriate solution.”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” he manages. His feet won’t carry him back home. He can’t go to his parents. There’s nowhere he can go right now without a hefty amount of assistance, and it all seems so far away.

“Are you okay?”

“No?

“Mentally, physically, emotionally?”

“None of the above?” he tries, stupidly. The sound of his voice alone is enough to prove that, in person or over the phone.

“Where are you?”

He rattles off the address as best he can remember it, and focuses on his breathing while Blair’s silent, either looking it up or crawling out of bed or stumbling upstairs to get in the car. He’s already moving. Vance can hear him.

“I’ll be there as quick as I can,” Blair says. He hears keys clanking together. “If you even move half a block from that location, I’ll scalp you.”

“Got it,” he says weakly. There’s something else Blair wants to say; hesitance in a voice is one of the most obvious giveaways that he can identify nowadays. 

Vance allows himself to hang up before he can say it.

“Is someone coming?” Farren asks. He nods, allowing himself to sag against the wall. Her fingers briefly touch the bandages that curl around his thumb as if checking for their resilience against his constant stretching.

She pulls away. He nearly lets himself sink to the floor. 

“I’m gonna go wait downstairs,” he says, unsure of how long it will even take Blair to get there. Not too long. Longer, if he obeys any sort of existing traffic laws, but Blair has never been the type to listen to a sign’s suggestion and neither has he, apparently.

“You don’t have to,” Farren starts, but she steps aside to let him go. She knows as well as he does that the energy isn’t there to fight her.

He expects her to follow, though, and follow she does. It takes him an embarrassingly long moment to even find the stairs considering how fast he got down them earlier and even longer to get to the bottom floor, too afraid to slip and go crashing down. If he falls, he won’t get back up.

Staring out the entrance doors, he doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing at all. Too many words and he’ll be sick; his stomach is turning enough that it may happen regardless.

And his head is still silent, too.

It takes longer than he would have liked for Blair to get there, announced by a car pulling up to the curb in the dead of night. Only one other had passed in all the minutes it took.

Farren grabs his arm, half raised to reach for the door. “If you need anything—”

“I don’t.”

“Ever,” she insists. “Anytime, whatever it is, you let me know.”

She drags up his sleeve, one that doesn’t belong to him. It has to be fucking Casper’s. She writes something on the inside of his arm with a pen that she didn’t have before. A phone number. Hers, clearly. She’s not giving out anyone else’s.

“You’re going to get yourself killed helping people like this,” he tells her.

“And you’re going to get yourself killed accepting it. We’re even.”

They’re not, not once she finds out, and she will find out. He’s got her number scribbled on his arm now.

The truth is hard to respond to. Farren lets go of his arm, effectively excusing him from coming up with something, and he flees before she can change her mind. Out the door, down the stairs, and then flinging himself into the passenger seat, not even looking at where he’s putting his feet.

Blair looks at him, and then past him. “I don’t even want to know.”

“Then don’t ask. Just go, please.”

Blair does. He practically floors it away from the building, and Vance clutches the edge of the seat to ground himself, ignoring the burning sensations in his palms. He needs something to hold onto, and it can’t be his own skin right now.

“Am I getting a lecture?” he asks. Blair turns the next corner.

“Do you want one?”

“No.”

“Then don’t ask,” Blair mimics, but even his voice sounds a shade unlike himself. Drained, or beyond that. He’s got to be empty by now. Vance knows that because he is, too.

More silence, again. He used to be so good at quiet, and now he hates it. He grew used to there always being background noise, a voice close or far away, something easing into his head and never quite leaving…

He told Casper to get out, and now it’s silent.

What has he done?

“Three fucking days,” Blair mutters. “If you’re going to start crying on me, I’d appreciate some warning.”

“I’m sorry.” His eyes are watering, but nothing’s coming out yet.

“You’re on house arrest now, I hope you know.”

“Until when?”

“Until we figure the rest of this shit out, and then I don’t have to worry about you disappearing. She can do it then.”

“Who?”

“Dimara.”

His heart picks back up again, into dangerously fast territory. “What?” he asks weakly.

“We talked to Shirin about bringing her back. Fucker wants to take chunks of our souls away in exchange, but whatever works, I guess.”

Vance blinks, trying to process. “Does he want mine?”

“The more the merrier.”

“Okay,” he says slowly. Blair gives him a peculiar look. Vance wishes he would focus on driving regardless of the non-existent traffic.

“That was easy.”

What was he supposed to say? No? He already said not long ago that his inside were a disintegrated, ugly mess. If that’s where his soul is too it’s in tatters like his hands are. It fled the scene after his first criminal act, after he tore that guy’s throat out and accidentally dumped him in Beckett’s ramshackle grave.

“Do you think it’s going to work?”

“No idea,” Blair says. “Do you?”

He has little clue about anything, anymore. Every time he thinks something’s settled down, something else changes. It’s not like a simple shift in the schedule, setting his alarm for an hour earlier than normal. It’s always catastrophic. Now he knows Farren, and he shouldn’t, and Dimara’s still dead even if she might be coming back, and the silence in all of it is finally overtaking him.

“I know who the voice in my head was,” he says.

“Was?”

“I think I got rid of him,” he explains. “I told him to get out, and I think he did. No one else ever heard him, though. He told me that himself, and now I told him to get out and I think he’s gone. For good. And it’s my fault.”

The car is slowing, incrementally, because Blair keeps looking at him like he’s a sideshow freak. He keeps looking down to make sure nothing’s happening. No claws are sprouting from his hands, there are no bones shifting.

All he can see is the slam of his own heart up against his skin, up and down and up and down.

The car jerks to the side and pulls off the road, taking a sharp turn into an entirely empty parking lot.

“I told you I want some warning,” Blair insists. His heart is going faster than the car, at this point. Blair’s pulled off somewhere, but his eyes are so blurry that he can’t even make out the fringes of the neon sign dangling above their heads. He fumbles to get the door open, tripping out of the car before Blair’s even put the thing in park.

He tells himself three times not to go for the hands anymore, but that only leaves his arms, unless he plans on being inventive and turning to his legs instead.

There are scars everywhere. It doesn’t matter what he turns to next.

Blair grabs both of his arms and wrenches them away from his chest. “Why are you still hurting yourself?”

“It’s the only thing I know how to do.”

“Then we need to find an alternative. Hurt me, if you need to, but stop hurting yourself.”

He shakes his head, and tears spill over, finally. The main motivation behind hurting himself is so he doesn’t turn on someone he knows, someone who doesn’t deserve to be torn apart. He saved Blair’s life over a week ago. He’s pretty invested in keeping it that way.

“I don’t know how you’re handling this,” he manages. “I don’t—”

“You wanna know a secret?” Blair asks. “I’m not. Nobody is handling this, least of all me. I’m not Dimara.”

“None of us are. That’s why we can’t do this.”

“So we get her back. We get her back and then we figure out this whole mess. Make that voice in your head return if you want it so badly. And then you stop hurting yourself. You don’t deserve it, and you need to stop telling yourself you do.”

He does, doesn’t he? How does he not? One day someone else will die because of him, and he’ll taste blood in his mouth again.

Vance is a cycle now. That’s what he’s been reduced to.

And it’ll happen again. It always does.

“Are you going to shred me to bits if I hug you right now? Blair asks.

“What?” he croaks. Blair mutters something under his breath, letting go of his arms only to properly hug him. The entrapment has been the worst part - stuck at a funeral, stuck in an apartment, stuck in a car. Blair is still stronger than him, always will be, and for some reason being trapped on the receiving end of a hug, unable to move, is not a bad thing.

It should be.

He’s not Dimara. Dimara would have marched right up into the lobby of the apartment building and then hugged him, after she punched him first, right then and there. Then, inevitably, he would have broken down crying three days later when it finally hit him, as it was always going to. A hug wouldn’t fix that.

Blair let it happen because Blair knew it was going to happen, and now he’s here to pick up the pieces, hugging him to mold him back into one.

“Are you okay?” he asks, muffled into Blair’s shoulder, a stupid question if he’s ever heard one. Issue being he’s full of them.

“Does it matter?”

He said that same thing to Vance weeks ago now, fresh out of the hell of being starved and practically tortured. He didn’t say it then, and he should have.

“Of course it does,” he says. Casper isn’t here to chime in this time with a sharp no one’s ever fine but at least Vance knows it now.

“It does,” he continues, quieter.

Blair nods, even if he doesn’t believe it. Blair’s still acting as Dimara even if he doesn’t properly know how; his own emotions are the last thing on his mind. He has to fix everyone else, first.

He has little clue how long they stand there beyond the frame of too long, a span of time that should be strange but isn’t. Blair doesn’t let go of him and Vance doesn’t try to escape. Being stuck here like this is squashing the familiar urge to run all the way out of him. He stops shaking gradually. The tears take longer, but eventually they stop flowing.

There’s nothing happening to him. He’s still human.

“By the way,” Blair says casually. “Nadir’s pregnant.”

Vance goes for something, at least a semblance of an alarmed noise, and inhales air the wrong way instead. Blair pulls him back by the shoulders as he coughs and chokes, spluttering to try and regain the smallest flow of air into his lungs.

It fails spectacularly.

“What?” He wheezes out the word in-between frantic coughs, clutching at his chest. There’s no urge to tear into himself. He just wants air again, and Blair’s terribly, deadly serious face isn’t helping one bit. Vance’s eyes are streaming again too, for a different reason than before. There’s no stopping it.

Blair waits until he’s breathing again, and then kicks his door all the way open. “Home?”

Vance looks up at him. There’s no telling what he’s thinking; he’s too infuriatingly good at hiding it. Vance really needs to learn that trick instead of sobbing in a random, empty fast food parking lot half past five in the morning.

Blair still has one hand locked around his shoulder, though, a grounding point, something to focus on. Vance doesn’t think he needs it anymore. He can get back in the car and go home.

Home is almost starting to sound good again.

—

—

—

Blair, in the truest sense of the terms, puts Vance to bed.

By that he means he stands outside his closed door for a while and waits there until his breathing is evened out, until there’s no other alternative other than him having passed out, finally. Then he tacks a note on Kelsea’s door that says only HE’S BACK and heads back out to the car.

He grabs the shovel Vance brought out into the woods from the back shed just over a week ago, now, re-checks the directions to Riverside Cemetery, and leaves.

It’s clear that no one else can do this. It’s abundantly fucking clear.

He has to do it himself.

There’s not a single part of him that wants anyone else doing it. It’s too much to handle on already feeble shoulders, to people who are seconds from collapsing. One wrong word, one ugly move, and it’s over. They’re all going down.

The truth of it is there's not a single part of him that wants to do it either

The good thing about life, at least, is that its proven time and time again he matters very little in the grand scheme of it. His wants and whims and desires mean nothing. He's doing it, period. End of story.

Riverside really isn't all that far away. He gets there just before dawn hits and slogs his way up the hill through the early morning mist to the mound of dirt stuck up in the middle, surrounded by flattened graves.

It's a hard decision - is it better or worse that there's no headstone, no marker to tell him who it really is?

It could be anyone. Maybe they made a mistake and put someone else down there. It was closed casket for a reason, right?

Blair starts digging not to find out, but because he's come this far and he refuses to go back to the house without having done it.

He won't get a second chance on his own. 

It's deeper than Beckett was. Clearson didn't have invested time or talent into digging graves, evidently. It still takes him a fraction of the time it would take anyone else to hit the casket, shovel clanking against it a few times over as he finishes scraping the dirt from the top of it.

It could be anyone. It's nondescript. Stunningly average. Back in the day you either got a king's funeral or a hole out back with two sticks tied together over top of it that constituted for a cross.

He doesn't know what he was going to get before he picked up his own corpse and walked out on its feet.

Probably the latter.

She deserves better than this, though. She deserved better than a lot of things.

That's why he's doing it. He can hear her screaming, the insults slung his way, the confused yet slightly astonished wonder behind yet another of his foolish decisions. The only issue being he can't hear anything at all and she's not here to stop him.

He ends up having to break the metal clasping mechanism off the side to heft the thing open.

The cold may have slowed it, some, but it still smells unmistakably like death and something worse. Something that won't leave his head for a long time.

She does not appear to be sleeping. That's a fucking lie made for movies and television to make people feel better about death, but the thing is, there's nothing that will. It's through and through awful; no sunshine and rainbows and roses. Her head is propped up slightly but that only makes the discoloration of her skin more noticeable and whatever they pasted over top of it to disguise it. There's nothing right about the shape of her body, and it's shifted some to reveal the beginning point of the inch and a half long stab wound in her chest.

It's an odd disconnect. It's her but it really isn't. There's nothing her about it.

It's a corpse.

He ends up scooping up said corpse using the extra sheet he brought from the house, dirt already smeared across it in places. 

He puts it in the trunk. Locks it. Scoops all the dirt back in the hole and reforms the misshapen mound that stood there before.

He gets back in the car, and pulls out of Riverside Cemetery, this time for good.

It doesn't lessen the fact that her body is in the car, and the scent of death is stronger than ever.

He just unearthed her dead body.

It's getting worse the longer he dwells on it.

There's no way to make it good, either. It's like he said; death is just that. There's no easing into it, no way around it. Once you're thinking about it you can't stop.

If he dared to look back, craned his neck over the back seats, he could see it. There’s enough early morning traffic that he won’t allow himself to follow through with it. Now that the moon has come and gone the people have shown up alongside the sun, on a mission from point A to point B at breakneck speeds down the highway.

There’s a strong, highly likely chance he shouldn’t have done this alone.

The pit in his stomach is yawning, opening up wider and wider with every passing mile, and into it everything is sinking.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the car is going to smell like this forever no matter what they do to it. The car that she just bought last month. Everything in the end comes back to her. Rooke would still be alone. He never would have gotten into the house. Someone else would have found Celia, someone bad. With Celia gone Rory probably would be, too. Kelsea would have had nowhere to bring Vance.

Nadir and Tanis would still be somewhere in the woods and he wouldn’t have had the faintest clue.

He would never have known.

He had a life, once upon a time, and the reason he has one now is dead and in the trunk where he thought smart to put her. 

It was not, as it turns out, smart.

Not much he does is.

A car lays on their horn behind him; he’s practically crawling down the highway, making progress at a snail’s pace. As soon as the horn stops his phone starts again - it keeps going off, incessant pings that repeat every two minutes or so. Everyone’s awake by now. He’s not supposed to go anywhere alone, none of them are.

And he is technically alone.

He can see the exit, though. Another car horn goes off, and Blair yanks the car off to the side, onto the shoulder. Gravel crunches under the wheels.

The horn is still blaring as someone goes shooting past him up the exit ramp, but they don’t seem to care much about his stasis save for how it’s impacting their arrival time.

His phone chimes again. He resists the urge to open the window and pitch the thing into the trees. The most messages are from Nadir, predictably, but he’s got one from just about everyone. Three from Celia. They all look angry, at first glance. Two from Tanis; one is just a long, confused string of question marks. The last one reads Dimara but he knows that only means it’s from Rooke, and all it says is are you okay?

It’d be nice if people would stop asking him that.

If Vance is still asleep, then that really is everyone. No one trusts Rory or Kelsea anywhere near a phone anymore, or ever, for that matter.

He told Vance, too, if he called that Blair would come. And he did. But he didn’t give himself that same luxury. No one knows where he is, what he’s doing. He didn’t tell anyone to come running if he needs to do.

Another text. This one is from Nadir, at least, which makes him want to throw it a little less. It’s one line, as if a follow up to Rooke’s question: just tell me you’re okay.

He’s not. He doesn’t type that in and send it off.

They probably think him dead. All they know for certain is that Vance is back and that he disappeared not long after dropping him into bed. Beyond that they have no answers and judging by the silence he’s not giving them anyway.

It starts ringing, three minutes later. He lets it go to voicemail. If he opens his mouth right now nothing good is going to come of it.

Someone’s going to kill him for this, appropriate because death is all he feels right now.

It starts ringing, again. He almost lets it go.

When he answers on what he’s certain is the last ring he tries to say something, but nothing happens. His throat is closing up, leaving him voiceless and unknown.

“Blair?” Nadir asks. She has no way to tell if it’s him or a stranger that found his phone abandoned alongside the road, and he has no way to tell her. If he opens his mouth anymore than he’s already tried he’s going to turn into Vance and start crying out of nowhere. He’s the only one that hasn’t now, at one point or another.

“Just tell me where you are,” she offers, without digging any further.

Blair wedges the phone against his shoulder and locks both hands around the steering wheel, folding himself over it. Even doing that doesn’t help his breathing, and it certainly doesn’t get rid of the smell any.

He tries. There’s no saying he doesn’t. But every movement is making his own eyes well up, like last night redux.

“Blair—”

He hangs up before he can talk himself out of it and then goes rooting around in his texts. It’s not even an explanation, just an exit number and a vague description of where he’s sitting in the middle of it with dirt-smeared fingers. Some of it is stuck underneath his nails.

He doesn’t get a response, and fifteen minutes later someone is tapping at the window.

It’s too quick, but he knows it’s her. It’s even quicker than the speed at which he got to Vance, but anything’s possible for them.

She knocks again. The door’s locked - he knows this. He’s still effectively wrapped around the steering wheel, trying to draw in breath and keep himself focused on the dashboard. The tears are coming whether he wants them or not, but he’s hoping to slow their progress.

He reaches up, robotic, and flicks the lock. The door opens instantly, buffeting him with frigid November wind. It’s air he so desperately craved.

Her hand slides up his arm to his shoulder, but goes no further.

The hesitance is easy to place - if he’s choking on it than she can smell it, too.

“Trunk,” he manages. Speaking finally kickstarts the tears, worse when she lets go of him. The trunk opens and stays that way for almost a full minute before she slams it shut.

Her silence is heavy when she returns, crouching down next to the open door so that he can see her underneath his arm without moving. This angle is making everything worse for the crying, and has chest has no room to expand. Every breath is coming out too shallow, allowing him little time to gain a proper one.

Nadir sighs. “You are so, so stupid.”

He nods. It would be an easy moment to laugh at any other day.

She pries his hands loose from the steering wheel and pulls him from the driver’s seat, though he offers little resistance in the matter knowing what’s coming. She wraps both arms around him, squeezing until he can feel it everywhere despite the cold. The wind is stinging his eyes, and the warmth of the sun isn’t enough, and nothing’s right. How could anything be right with him crying like this?

The panic of it all is sending him even further down the trail aptly named hysterics.

“Why did you do it alone?” she asks, muffled.

“I had to.”

“That’s not true, and you know that. Any of us would have come with you.”

“But none of you wanted to.

“And you wanted to?” she asks. “Look at me.”

He doesn’t. He presses his face tighter into her shoulder and she doesn’t try to move him.

“I know why you did it,” she continues quietly. “That doesn’t mean I like it.”

Everyone must know that, or at least they will once they’ve figured it out. He still has to go back to the house later and face them.

It’s what she would have done, if their positions were reversed. Dimara would have unburied him too.

“Thank you,” she murmurs. Maybe not her first choice of words that she would have liked to say, but they bring him half a foot back from the edge. This here wasn’t about him, it was about them. No one deserves what they’re all going through; at least he’s been alive long enough to have seen some of the worst of it. They’ve been unprepared since the moment she died.

“Don’t go anywhere alone again,” she instructs. “Next time—”

“There won’t be one,” he swears. He’s not sure he could have another even if he wanted.

“Are you sure about that?”

He nods, and finally she pulls back just enough to get a good look at him. She swipes away some of the tears streaked down his cheeks and stretches up on her toes to kiss his forehead.

“We’ll get through this,” she murmurs, and he feels it. “Get in the car. I’ll drive.”

“I can do it.”

“You realize you’re still crying?”

“I can,” he insists, wiping some of them away itself. “It’s only two minutes. It’s fine.”

Blair can’t just shut down entirely no matter how heavy and looming the temptation is, and she’s not going to leave the bike here, either. He’d ideally not to lose anybody else’s attachments while they’re at it.

“I got it,” he says. He reaches back for the car door, and lets him go, though her hands linger for a moment longer and so do her eyes. She watches him carefully as he eases himself back behind the wheel in an attempt to hold his breath, and only then does she go back to the bike.

It takes less than two minutes, with the speed.

He pulls up outside of the aptly named house of horrors and gets out before the wheels have even stopped rolling to breathe again, wiping away the last of the mess on his face. Hiding it isn’t feasible; the evidence is everywhere and anyone within a mile’s radius could see it.

He’s not shutting down, but he stays put until Nadir gets off the bike and then takes the keys from his unmoving hand to pop the trunk open once again.

Blair is bracing himself, because he knows what’s coming.

Camden actually beats him to the trunk he stands there so long and is leaning around the edge of it, examining the mess Blair has managed to make of it, by the time he gets there. It’s like he was waiting for this.

“I’m not in the mood for you right now,” he informs him, voice still off. Camden turns his raised eyebrows to Blair’s face.

“Don’t,” Nadir says. There’s a warning if he ever heard one.

For some stupid reason, he thinks Nadir has a better chance of fighting off Camden right now than he does.

“Wasn’t going to,” Camden offers. “Dead people smell awful.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?”

“Shirin’s fault, not mine,” Camden insists. He grabs Blair’s reaching arm, vice tight, stopping him from going to pick her up. “Do you want me to?”

“What?”

Camden gives him an exaggerated look that screams stupid just about as clearly as Nadir’s direct words did a few minutes ago. It would mean more if Camden wasn’t equally stupid himself, but he is. So that’s where they’re at.

“I’ll take her,” Camden says slowly. “Get the fuck out of here.”

He stares. Nadir crosses her arms over chest and does the same. It comes to his attention that they’re protecting a dead body.

“Stop looking at me like I’m going to eat her,” Camden says. “That’s your forte, not mine.”

“What about Shirin?”

“Shirin’s not going to eat her either.”

“What’s he going to do?” he prompts.

“Fuck if I know. Some magic bullshit that I don’t understand. He’ll probably preserve her body for a few days and… fix it while you fuckers make up your stupid minds.”

Not one of them has ever pretended to understand Shirin’s short-comings, and alongside it his things that… aren’t. Even Camden doesn’t know, and Camden spends every waking minute of every day with the guy. This is what he’s being left to trust because there’s no other alternative.

Nadir looks at him. “Go for it,” he says, trying and failing for something casual. Camden lets go of his arm and he lets it fall to his side, where it stays.

The pit in his stomach is taking up every inch of available space when Camden scoops her up and then departs without a single word.

“Get back in the car,” Nadir instructs.

He listens. That might, in an odd twist, be the only thing Blair is good at right now. He sits mechanical behind the wheel while Nadir follows Camden all the way to the porch and then up the stairs. The thought of her in there almost entirely on her own isn't one that sits comfortably in his chest, but he allows it for his own sanity.

When she returns her phone is to her ear, but he has little interest in trying to listen in on the conversation. She taps on the window again on her way by; he starts the car and rolls it down at her expectant look.

"Love you," she says, and leans in to kiss him quickly. "We'll be home soon."

She withdraws the phone, hand covering most of it, but he still sees Tanis name at the top of the screen before she leaves him.

Everyone will know sometime in the next five minutes, long before they get back. Nothing is without purpose. They'll be home soon, indeed, but what will be waiting for them when they do?

He's going to find out soon enough.

—

—

—

Tanis parks herself on the couch and doesn’t move.

It’s difficult to make herself do anything even remotely productive after Nadir’s phone call, after what Blair did.

It’s worse that she has to explain just what he did to everyone else, getting a thrilling mixture of shock and upset and confusion. No anger though, which is odd. There’s been so much of it lurking about that it seemed to be a permanent fixture.

Telling Vance once he wakes up isn’t as difficult as she expects, if only because Blair made sure to bring it up sometime in the night.

You know, before he disappeared.

They’re back now, though. You’d have to be deaf now to hear it.

By the time Nadir opens the door to let Blair in everyone is in sight one way or another, creeping in the living room to join her or hovering in the kitchen or on the upstairs landing, watching the door.

Blair looks at her first, mostly because she’s one of the few with the gall to stare right at the door. She’s also conveniently the closest.

It’s probably hard not to look.

It means she gets a good, proper look at him and how absolutely wrecked he looks as a whole. It’s the full magnitude of what he’s been trying to hide the past week in front of them now, finally laid bare.

“You’re stupid,” Vance says.

“And you’re one to talk,” Blair fires back. Tanis was just thinking that exact thing. He turns, headed for the basement stairs.

“Hey, asshole,” Celia quips. Tanis braces herself as she grabs his arm, forcing him to a halt. She removes her hand only to punch him, hard, in the exact same spot she just let go of. It’s stopped him, but it doesn’t even make him flinch.

“You are stupid,” she reiterates, and then hugs him, equally hard.

It’s an odd thing to watch, mostly because Blair just stands there and lets her do it without moving. He’s dealt with giving out hugs and been on the receiving end of more than he’d like in an ideal six months, let alone a week. Celia shakes him until he hugs her back, but even he looks perplexed about the entire situation.

“Why are you going downstairs?” she asks. “Are we not leaving?”

“Where, exactly?”

“You brought her there, did you not?” Celia asks, taking a step back. “So why the fuck are we still here?”

“I thought—”

“That’s a rarity,” Celia interrupts. “I know exactly what you thought. I’ve made up my mind. We all have. Just don’t make me say I told you so if this all goes south.”

Blair sighs. “You’ll say it anyway.”

“I will,” she agrees. “So are we leaving, or not?”

He looks around, to everyone else. Tanis gives him a thumbs up when he looks her way, and no one else even breathes a word of protest, so that’s that, apparently.

She guesses they’re going.

—

—

—

Rooke gets banished outside.

It’s not so bad in the daylight. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the trees are moving in the wind. It doesn’t do much to change the appearance of the otherwise ramshackle, hole-in-the-wall house, but what can you do?

Shirin takes one look at him when they arrive and tells him, promptly and not very nicely, to leave. Rooke figures it’s because he’s already dead and doesn’t have much use in this particular experiment. He drags Parker from the basement, too, with one hand locked in the collar of his shirt, and then shoves him out the front door as well.

He gets a few seconds to look around, wide-eyed, as if he hasn’t seen the outside in years, before Shirin pitches Camden out after them and then slams the door shut. The whole door almost falls out of the frame.

Camden mutters something filthy under his breath, shoots Rooke a glare where he’s sitting in the grass, and then quite literally vanishes into the woods.

“Will he be okay?” Rooke asks, despite his better judgement.

“Camden?” Parker hesitates. “Never.”

Rooke lays back in the grass to wait, and after a moment Parker sits down beside him. He really hopes Isi is gone, or else he may allow himself to be slightly offended that she was allowed to stay and he wasn’t.

This whole place is still a mystery, something that a detective needs to be put on the case of. People disappear, people come back to life. And there are more out there too, connected, but it seems they had the good sense to flee while they could.

It doesn’t look like Parker got that chance. If he did it was fleeting, and he missed it.

It would be hard to pass for something that could survive on his own; slightly glowy eyes and the appearance of a twelve year old doesn’t help much in that category. At least Rooke can pass for a normal human being. He doesn’t have to worry about the trivial things like sleeping and eating unless he wants to feel like one.

A lot of people don’t even see him. Most people don’t want to, either.

“Do you want to be here?” he asks. Parker shrugs, gazing at the puffy clouds, reserves of awe in his eyes left for something so simple.

“It’s fine,” he answers. 

“Is it? We could take you with us.”

Parker turns a look on him, a different kind of awe sparked to life, as if shocked that someone would dare offer him something like that.

“I’m okay,” Parker assures him. “I think… my parents and sister moved to Vermont last year. I might go look for them.”

A year. So he’s been dead, undead, at least that. Most likely more by at least six months if they packed up and moved state.

Just like his did.

“My dad did a lot of research into the supernatural,” Parker continues. “I’m hopeful that they won’t react too negatively.”

“And what if they do?”

Parker tangles his fingers in the grass, threading individual pieces through his fingers. “Then I may have to take you up on your offer, if you’re still here.”

“We will be.” Rooke’s not too sure of that. He might stay no matter what, but he can’t make everyone else. Not if the world is ending around them, piece by piece. It’s too much to ask. But he will be, especially if there’s even the smallest chance that someone may come back.

Camden comes back ten minutes later with Isi trailing him, looking like he picked a fight with a bramble bush and lost. He’s scowling, but Isi is smiling.

“Shirin said,” Parker starts, but Camden ignores him and barges back into the house and Isi floats on in after him as if Parker didn’t speak at all. It doesn’t seem to matter much, though - Kelsea pokes her head out the door, catching sight of them in the grass. He expected to feel something; the earth shaking and opening up, a drop in the temperature.

He’s felt nothing.

“What happened?” he asks.

“He did it, I guess?” she says, sounding confused herself. “I feel like I’m about to throw up but I think I’ve felt like that for two days or so.”

He stands up, brushing the grass from his pants. If Kelsea just lost a part of herself and didn’t feel anything then he probably wasn’t meant to either. Something like this warrants a bigger, more earth-shattering feeling, though. Where is it?

“So she’s…”

“Not yet,” Parker says. “It doesn’t happen instantaneously. Or at least it didn’t with me.”

The unspoken if it happens at all is left hanging in the air between them, foreboding as ever. He’s not going to think like that yet.

“So what are we doing?” he asks, getting to his feet. He busies himself picking spare strands of grass from his pants courtesy of Parker’s incessant and unnecessary weeding as Kelsea approaches. He doesn’t ask why no one else has come outside.

“Taking her home, he said,” she informs him. “That’s what he said. Give it twelve hours.”

“And what happens after twelve hours?”

“If it’s close to a sixty percent chance in the first twelve then after that, maybe five percent?” Parker guesses. “Less than. If she’s not back by tomorrow morning…”

He trails off. Parker doesn’t seem much like the trailing off type; he’s jumpy to a fault because of the hand he’s been dealt, but he’s always sure of what he’s saying.

“What?” he prompts.

“If not by the morning, then put her back in the ground,” Parker says. “Don’t leave her any longer.”

There’s still that side of things, he reminds herself. The chance that she may not come back is still real and entirely plausible.

And they’ll all have to live forever with that thought, if that’s the case.

—

—

—

Vance allows himself to mentally tune out on the ride home.

Everyone has the good graces to allow him to sit in the front seat while Blair claims the keys, as hard as Celia tries to drive. They’re all still likely killable, after all. Celia driving is going to test that theory quicker than any of them want to.

Not that the smell is any better from the front seats, but he’s pretending for his own good that his theory is true.

He pulls his knees up and buries his head in-between them, instead trying to inhale the scents of things he should have washed out days ago, the stale scent of blood lingering around his arms.

At least he’s wearing his own clothes again. He was still half-delirious this morning, dressing in a stupor, but at least the open wounds on his arms have turned to thick, healing scabs, already beginning to flake off his arms.

Kelsea shoves him back upstairs and into his bed once again as soon as they arrive back home, leaving no room to interpret what they’re doing with Dimara. Something about Rooke’s room, last he heard. It’s not like he needs it.

Kelsea leaves with a promise to wake him the second something happens, but he doubts her attention span if something does will last long enough to involve him. He’ll just have to hope he hears it.

He is still tired, inside and out. Obviously so if she herded him up here and refused to her any arguments about it.

His nerves are shot, though. Everything inside him is fried to a crisp and on top of it all he’s pretty positive a chunk of his soul just shot out of his body courtesy of Shirin. It’s difficult to let your body relax when there’s no reason to. It would be easy to say that nothing’s going to happen if he sleeps a bit more, but he doesn’t know that. No one knows that.

He flops around for a bit. Listens to the hushed conversation in the hallway and then the clicking of nails as Bagel goes trotting past his room, once and then twice.

At least now he can’t smell anything awful.

“You should text Farren,” Casper says.

He jolts, and then slams his arm into the bedside table, pulling yet another scab back. He sends the whole table rocking so violently the lamp nearly careens off into the floor.

“Asshole,” he manages, then reminding himself to be quiet.

He’s just talking to himself again, no big deal.

“Where did you go?” he continues, under his breath. “What the hell?”

“Nowhere,” Casper answers. “I just shut my mouth. Don’t really know how to leave.”

So half of him losing his shit the past twelve hours has been for approximately nothing. Great.

Vance drags the arm of his sleeve up until he exposes the slew of numbers written just under his elbow; they’ve been slightly smudged, and they’re beginning to fade. He types them into his charging phone and saves it, but does nothing more.

“Are you going to?” Casper asks.

“Shut up. You’re the worst.”

“Sorry there’s isn’t a handbook on how to be a ghost. Can you ask Rooke for me?”

“You’re not even a ghost,” he points out. “Ghosts haunt places, not people. You’re a fucking poltergeist.”

“Is that what I’m doing? Haunting you?”

“Seems that way. And you’re not even good at it. You just talk to me.” He sighs, rolling onto his stomach and safely away from the bedside table, putting enough distance between him and anything that could hurt him. Blair was right about that, even if he isn't very often. He needs to stop.

“I’m trying,” Casper says.

“Trying what?”

“The glass, in the apartment.”

He blinks. “Was that you?”

“I was just messing around. I’ve never actually come into contact with anything before. It was just a second; it went right through when I tried to catch it after that.”

“And nothing since?”

“Haven’t tried. Like I said. Keeping quiet.”

Casper’s a person. Was. Still is? He’s no different than Rooke except Vance can’t actually see him. He also can’t hear Rooke in his head even when he’s vanished like smoke, but that’s something he’s willing to ignore.

It’s different now that he has a face, a name. He’s literally Casper the fucking ghost.

Poltergeist. Whatever.

“You should try,” he says quietly. If Casper’s stuck like this for good, then what use is there in telling Farren? She’ll never be able to hear him, or see him. Instead she’ll just never have the choice to move on, living with the knowledge that he’s there but not.

But if he could figure it out…

“You think so?” Casper asks.

“Yeah,” he answers. “But quietly. Let me sleep.”

He thinks he hears something, almost like a laugh, but it’s silent otherwise when he buries his face in the pillow, inhaling the familiar scent of home and relatively safety and hope, even.

It’s not a very long sleep. The light has hardly changed at all when he wakes, eyes sticky with sleep, but he feels slightly less heavy, like something has lifted. No one’s come to get him, and the house is quiet.

Nothing’s happened. It’s too easy to let the dread settle back over him.

The time becomes less and less every hour. Closer to the worst.

It takes him a moment even upon sitting him to realize that every pillow previously on the bed, save for the one he had claimed for sleeping, was lying untouched on the floor.

Every single one.

He blinks a few times, unwilling to trust his sleep-heavy eyes, but the scene remains the same.

Vance scoops up his phone before the idea not to arises instead and shoots off the quick text: home safe, sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. Thanks. and puts it face-down back on the table before he can get distracted by any immediate reply.

“You really are an asshole,” he says to the empty room, nudging one of the pillows. The bed is hardly disturbed otherwise. There’s no hearing a smile, but he can imagine it clear as day. He has an image now, and it means more than he thought it would.

He’s harboring an awful lot of hope for someone that has zero reason to. For Dimara, for Casper. For himself and the life he has no choice but to live now.

But someone has to live it.

—

—

—

Everyone slinks off, individually, but Rooke doesn’t dare believe that anyone goes to sleep.

It’s just after eleven. That leaves two full hours, tops. Then they go from sixty to five.

Rooke sits on the couch alone, in the cold dark, and doesn’t move for four.

Four.

And nothing happens.

He doesn't expect to be alone for those four. Surely someone, anyone, would be up here at exactly the twelve hour mark waiting for her. Right?

All of his theories are incorrect. The only one that moves at all is Bagel, constantly clicking around and rattling his water bowl, uneasiness in his permanent awakening as if he too can sense that something isn't right.

Parker said to put her back in the ground come morning. It's after three now. No one's joined him because as the hours fade by everyone is realizing what they refused to confront head-on; that it didn't work. That she's not coming back and all of it, every little sacrifice, was for nothing.

3:45. He almost gets up, but there's nowhere else to go. She's in his room.

3:51. The whole house groans in the wind, and he waits for the noise to stop to see if anything else has occurred.

Nothing.

4:01. Another hour gone.

At quarter past Bagel trots over to bark at him, just once, and he still jumps despite watching him amble all the way across the room to do it. When there's nothing else available as a distraction it's the little things that get you.

Three minutes later he starts barking again, but he's nowhere in sight. The noise, sharp and high-pitched, is coming down the stairs directly at him, and keeps repeatedly at regular intervals. It comes to a point where it's impossible to think that it's nothing. Maybe he's discovered someone else awake.

Rooke allows himself to travel upstairs, but the hallway is disturbingly empty.

Save for Bagel, that is. He's standing at the end of the hall in front of Rooke's bedroom door, tail wagging incessantly. The constant barking tapers off into a whine at the sight of Rooke, as if trying to get a point across.

Oh God.

"What the hell is he doing?" Celia asks behind him, the door creaking open. Rooke doesn't know and won't allow himself to think about it, stepping down the hall to lay a hand on the doorknob. Bagel too looks up at him, scratching a single front paw down the door at its base. It's synonymous with open it.

So he does.

Bagel goes shooting in at the first sight of a gap, wedging himself through it and pulling the doorknob from Rooke's grasp as the door creaks inward.

The first thing he notices is the smell, or lack thereof. It's nearly gone.

The second is the figure sitting at the edge of the bed, facing the window.

He doesn't have a heart to stop, but it comes pretty close.

His voice is gone. Some days it feels like it was never really there to begin with. Bagel rounds the bed and barks again, but this one is somehow different. Dare he say it, but it almost sounds happy.

The figure turns around to look at him. Not just a figure, though.

He knows exactly who it is.

"What the fuck," Dimara says slowly. "Did you guys do?"

Rooke catches himself against the frame of the door before he can sink to the ground on his knees, but it doesn’t matter much. Celia barges past him and nearly knocks him to the floor anyway, flinging herself across the bed and over Dimara’s back. Both of them go careening back onto the bed, tangled from head to toe.

Celia is laughing, or crying. He’s definitely crying.

She looks completely normal, like nothing ever happened. It’s different with him - the thing that finally killed him is starkly obvious, but hers is hidden away. It’s almost enough to hide the fact that it ever happened at all. 

Dimara wiggles an arm free of Celia’s grip and points a finger at him. “Stop. Stop crying. What the hell did you do?” she repeats.

“We—”

“Don’t answer that,” she snaps. “I do not want to know. I am not supposed to be alive.”

No, she definitely is not. Her voice has brought everyone out of hiding; Vance is next, predictably, because of the noise, but Kelsea is hot on his heels. In a flurry of movement Rooke doesn’t manage to understand both of them end up in the pile, more limbs knocking together. The swearing is mostly from Dimara’s end as all four of them go rocking about.

He’s never been so glad to hear it in his life.

Rory is next, almost hesitant to step into the room, and everyone else is right behind him. Tanis gives one look to the scene at hand, absorbs it, and then inserts herself into the pile with a half-hearted shrug.

Dimara’s head finally comes free of the mess everyone’s created. “Rory,” she emphasizes, something upset in her voice. “Your face. Come here.”

He does, and by the time he gets close he’s crying too. Everyone else is, so there’s not really an issue with it. Dimara grabs him by the arm and drags him down, too, and he narrowly avoids landing right on top of the pile and flops to the side, instead, letting her wrap an arm around him.

It stays that way for a minute. Rooke can’t tell who’s who in the pile of bodies or what is even happening now that Dimara has scooted out some.

She jabs another finger out, releasing Rory for only a moment. This time it’s not directed at him.

“Stop,” she insists. “Both of you. Do not.”

Nadir may have a slight leg up in the keeping it together department, especially with Blair’s current state of mind, but they’re both about two seconds from tears by the looks of it.

At least Nadir looks happy, somewhat. Blair looks like he’s about to crumble again.

“Let me out,” Dimara continues. “Out, you assholes.”

Someone jabs her again, judging by her pained noise, and then she finally wiggles out from the majority of Celia’s weight and lunges to her feet, reaching one arm out for each of them. Blair stretches out for her too at the same time.

“You can have your fucking job back,” he manages, voice thick. “I don’t want it anymore.”

“I bet you sucked at it,” she says, jabbing him in the ribs with the arm she has around him, wedging Nadir under her other arm. It’s an odd thing to watch, especially with all of the tears involved, but if this is the weirdest thing he ever has to witness than it’s by far the best.

“He was alright,” Vance says.

“Fuck you,” Blair says. “I am never picking your sorry ass up again.”

A lie. A bold-faced one, even. He can’t help but laugh. It’s a mixture of every emotion under the sun and it’s oddly enough one of the best things he’s ever felt.

Dimara releases both Blair and Nadir at the same time, and rounds on him. “You didn’t think you were getting out of this, did you?” she asks. He didn’t, not for a second. He more than allows himself to be manhandled into a hug, letting the realization sink in. It’s actually her. They have her back. It’s a hug she’s given him so many times before all over again. Somehow this time is better than all of the others.

“How’s it feel to have a partner in the completely and totally dead?” she asks, earning a snivelly laugh into her shoulder.

“Awesome.”

“What about me?” Blair asks.

“What about you?” Dimara fires back. “You don’t have a permanently gaping hole in your chest.”

“It’s sewn shut.”

Dimara leverages one arm to confirm that herself but keeps him tucked underneath the other up against her shoulder, face twisting in something not unlike disgust.

“Awesome,” she echoes. “I’m gonna live forever now, aren’t I?”

“Seems that way,” Nadir says. “But so are all of us.”

Dimara turns a slow look on them all, rounding the room with an intensity that could only be her. No one else has ever given him a look like that; nothing even remotely similar comes to mind in his foggy memories.

“A sacrifice was made,” Vance says. It’s so dramatic he almost laughs again.

“Multiple!” Kelsea breaks in. She somehow manages to sound absolutely thrilled. “But I think it was totally worth it now.”

He had no stake in that either way, but he wanted her back just as much as the rest of them. Dare say it when he gets no opinion, but it evidently was worth it, and no doubt everyone here would do it over again if given the same choice tomorrow.

“I hate you all,” Dimara announces. “But get over here.”

Nine person group hugs don’t exist for a reason. It seems too complicated and messy from an outside perspective, something he isn’t fortunate to get as he’s wedged directly into the middle of it, still folded comfortably under her arm.

She’s not even any colder than before.

Conveniently, it’s nothing he would change for the world of it. It’s not possible that every awful thing they’ve gone through and will wake up to in the next few days is worth it, but it almost seems that way.

How could it not?

“So,” Tanis says slowly. “How do you feel about being an Aunt?”

Even Rooke is perplexed for a second until the realization sinks in and then fades once again, as it keeps doing. As everyone joins him it leaves only Dimara, eyebrows knitted together, face drawn together in confusion.

After a moment, she turns to look at Celia. The look on her face is priceless.

“Why the fuck are you looking at me?” Celia asks. “As if I would ever do this intentionally.”

“It wasn’t intentional,” Blair insists. He’s got a good view of Dimara’s face as the realization hits her; she looks at Blair, and then Nadir, and then back to Blair.

Her eyes narrow almost comically.

And yeah, maybe it shouldn’t be, but sue him.

It is just a little funny.

—

—

—

Being alive is a weird chore.

Being dead is worse.

Being alive after being dead is decidedly the cherry on top of the terribly frosted cake, Dimara knows.

Boy, does she know it now.

She’s never been the type of person that gets watched closely. She’s the one that does the watching; she looks over people, she protects them, she makes sure they’re safe in the worst moments. That’s her job. It’s the only one she’s ever known.

And then, suddenly, everyone is either unwilling to let go of her or refuses to let her out of their sights.

It’s unnerving to go from complete and total nothingness to this again, to eight pairs of eyes on her and even Bagel trotting after her in every waking moment. And she doesn’t feel any different, either. Looking in the mirror produces nothing. The only difference remains the gash down her chest, indeed neatly sewed up, and invisible underneath her shirt.

If you had no idea, there’d be no telling she was ever dead.

But she knows she was. The reactions of everyone around her are enough to prove it if nothing else is; it takes long enough just to get them to stop crying.

It does feel right, more so than usual, that all of them end up piling into the living room, dragging extra blankets and pitching in spare pillows. With such an extended period of time just to move downstairs at all, everyone is a notch beyond exhausted and she has to stare at them all individually just long enough to get them to succumb to it.

It’s more than just looks, though. Everyone is thinking the same thing: how can this possibly be real? Will they go to sleep and wake up and have it all be a figment of their imagination, a faraway dream?

Sometimes Dimara thinks that, too.

The time has left her only, thinking about it in silence, and Rooke who won’t go to sleep either way. Rory is still staring at the ceiling, blinking occasionally. Sleep is coming soon.

“You sure your face is okay?” she asks, leaning over the couch.

He offers a small smile. “It’s fine.”

It’s not, in the grand scheme of things. She knows it wasn’t her and so does he, but it was still her hand and almost one of his eyes.

At least the cyclops phase is over, as aptly named by Tanis. He can look at her with both eyes.

“Really, it’s good,” he insists, and then rolls over to face the other way, head landing against Celia’s shoulder. It seems as if the conversation is over at that, with what he wants her to believe.

“He’s good,” Blair murmurs to her right, draped over the armchair and nearly close enough to reach out and poke. She resists the urge.

“You sound very sure of that.”

“I did the parenting, remember?”

“You also just forfeited your job.”

“That I did,” he agrees, folding his arms up again to rest his head there. Blair sort of always looks tired no matter if he sleeps or not, but it’s worse right now. Not July-levels bad, but getting there. If he slept at all this past week it would be a miracle.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” she reminds him. “Get all the sleep while you can. With a kid you’re not going to be doing much of it.”

“That’s what you’re for.”

She scoffs, and he smiles into the safety of his own arms, though she still sees his lips quirk up. As if everything hasn’t changed enough already in the past year and in the next it will be shaken all over again.

At least one thing hasn’t changed much, though. Blair fights it for a bit and then listens to her, unintentionally or not, and is out cold without further discussion. It’s much quicker than she’s ever seen it before; a relief, is what it actually is, now that everyone’s finally asleep.

Besides her, that is. And Rooke, but she can’t actually bully him into it.

“You should call Kali,” he says quietly. They’ve been sitting in near silence for a while when he says it. Neither of them move a muscle, though Bagel raises his head and then immediately puts it back down upon the realization that nothing interesting is happening, at least nothing interesting enough to wake up for.

“Why?”

“She was there,” he tells her. “When you… after, I guess. She showed up. She was at the funeral, too, and a few days ago I told her we were trying to bring you back.”

They had a funeral for her. She died, quite dramatically, right in front of all of them, and to top it off somehow Kali made it there just in time to see it too. It was all for a reason; a knife in her own heart was better than one in anyone else’s.

“I said I’d let her know what was going on, but…”

“But you’re bad at texting?”

“Bad at communication in general,” he corrects. “And I don’t think it should come from me.”

He’s right - it really shouldn’t. Kali definitely deserves at least a simple hello, I’m back! after everything Dimara has put her through the past few months. In reality she deserves much more, especially after she showed up even when she shouldn’t have.

Dimara scoops up her phone where it’s resting between them and hovers over Kali’s name, finally swiping over to the messages. 

Can you come to the house in the morning? is all she types out, and she reads over all nine words at least half a dozen times before she sends them off. There’s no telling what Kali will believe when she reads them, and it is almost morning to boot, but that’s about the best she has the energy to do right now.

“You should go to sleep, too,” Rooke says. “I’ll stay up and wait for her.”

“You think she’ll come?”

“I know she will.” Confidence is not something that often comes paired with Rooke’s voice, but then it is. He clearly knows something she doesn’t and is willing to withhold the information if it means keeping her back from the brink of an existential crisis.

She’s already dead, alright? Undead, technically. That’s enough of a thing to have a crisis about; if she adds Kali to the list so quickly, and others are piling up on top of one another. Everyone in this room gave up a normal life to bring her back, for one. That means for the indefinite future they’re stuck together.

If she has to live forever, now, at least it doesn’t sound so bad when you put it like that.

And aren’t her and Rooke more similar than ever, now. He said almost that exact same thing to her once.

It seems like very long ago now.

“Go to sleep,” he repeats.

“Who’s parenting who now?” she asks, but shoves Blair’s leg off the armrest to claim it for her head, curling up in her own chair like everyone else already has.

“Still you.”

Yes, it is still her. Of everything that’s changed it’s a relief to know that one thing is still the same. No matter what a difficult job it is it’s something she wouldn’t change for the world, and she’s willing to shoulder the burden of it.

She’s dead now, anyway. She should be able to shoulder a little extra weight.

And she will, for them. They made every sacrifice in the world to bring her back.

She can do just one little thing, small as it is, for them.

—

—

—

It doesn’t take long.

The sun has risen when she wakes up, but it wasn’t that far off when she fell asleep in the first place.

Now though, it’s bright, but it doesn’t look as if the light has managed to disturb anyone. It’s just Rooke still awake, obviously so, and he’s out of his claimed chair and headed for the door.

The door. That’s what she heard.

Rooke opens it without any fanfare. Kali, on the other side, looks to him first. She looks just as exhausted as everyone else in this room once did. She notices the absolute mess they’ve managed to make of the living room second.

And then she locks eyes with Dimara.

There an entire list of things she could do, along with things she feels, and not a single one actually gets her to move. She really should.

“I’ll uh, just leave,” Rooke says, and then makes himself scarce and flees into the kitchen. After a moment, Bagel trots after him, leaving only the two of them staring at each other and everyone else in varying states of asleep around them.

Kali steps back onto the porch, so Dimara takes the invitation and edges out the door after her, shutting it softly.

When she turns, Kali throws herself into Dimara’s arms.

She nearly knocks both of them to the ground - Dimara just manages to catch them both against the stair railing and right them both. Kali is squeezing the life out of her, a poor attempt really, and not a possible one either. But she’s still strong as ever, and shaking like a leaf, and it sounds like she’s crying as quietly as she can manage.

“Hey,” Dimara says softly. Kali leans back and each of her hands frame Dimara’s face, soft and gentle.

“I thought they were full of shit,” she weeps, face wet with tears.

“They usually are,” she supplies.

“But you’re actually…”

“I’m actually here,” she confirms. “Ninety-nine percent whole, mostly mentally okay. I haven’t had a breakdown yet or anything, so I think I’m okay.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“No. But I’m better now that you’re here.”

Kali nods, as if it’s the same way for her. Dimara hasn’t started crying yet and doesn’t think she will. It’s as if the shock is finally settling in. She’s alive for Christ’s sake, and she definitely shouldn’t be, but something in the universe thought otherwise. The people who fought for her definitely did.

And Kali came for her. She was too late, but she did.

“I love you,” Kali says. “And I know that’s fucked up on so many different levels, but I don’t care. I don’t know how to stop.”

“And I don’t know what I’m doing, clearly,” she admits. “But I love you, too.”

She was dead twelve hours ago. Not long before that she was still in the ground because she drove a knife into her own heart to protect everyone else. Even the fact that she was taken over by the same thing that got Rooke once upon a time hasn’t fully sunken in, but one day it will. And when that day comes she wants Kali here, too.

“We can fix this,” Dimara says. “I want to fix this.”

“So do I.”

“I have a lot of time to figure it out.”

“So I’ve heard,” Kali says, sadly. “How are we gonna do this?”

“One way or another,” she says. “All I know is that we’re going to try. And when we figure it out, we will still be here.”

Kali nods. “No more lying. Don’t try and protect me from things you think will break me.”

“I won’t.”

“In exchange, I got you - forever,” she says. “I want it to be forever.”

There’s another list formed, then. It’s one that contains all of the things Dimara wants so terribly in life, things that never existed before the past few months began.

And she doesn’t deserve any of it, is the issue. Not after what she does. That’s why taking herself out of the equation seemed so simple. She was becoming the poison in everyone. The quicker she removed it the quicker everyone could move on.

And then no one did.

But this world, these sacrifices, they brought her back for a reason. It was not for nothing. It rarely is these days.

“We’re about to go into something with unforeseen consequences,” she says. “Death clearly being one of them. Does that still stand?”

“Forever,” she reiterates, bringing down one hand between them to raise her pinky up. “How about you?”

“Forever,” she agrees, but gently pushes her hand down until there’s enough room to wrap their arms around each other again, pressed flushed together.

Dimara doesn’t feel any guilt for once, when she leans in to kiss her. She just feels Kali’s smile.

If that’s the only reason she’s back here, then it might just be enough.

—

—

—

Dimara gets through the whole day, a frigid twenty-four hours, without losing her mind.

It’s that whole one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

One small step for the newly undead, one giant leap for… well everyone, really.

Kali is there for almost half the day, constantly with one arm wrapped around her waist or inserted into the curve of her elbow. She doesn’t talk much. There’s still hours and hours of conversation that need to be had in order for this to work, but now’s not the time.

If it’s not Kali, it’s someone else, and when Kali finally leaves it’s always someone else but there’s little room for blame.

They all missed her like a limb, like a lung. It’s like they needed her around to breathe.

So until she herds them all to bed once again that same night it’s a constant whirlwind of check-ins and pesterings and random hugs all over again. Celia almost starts crying on her again, Celia of all people. It’s a very jarring situation all-around.

It’s not a relief to be free of them all for the night; that’s not the right word. She still loves them most days more than she thinks she loves herself. It’s the quiet she needs, a resting point for her brain to cycle through everything and properly absorb it for once.

At least until someone knocks on her door.

It’s still silent, however. Even Blair these days makes enough noise to alert someone to his presence before he scares the living daylights out of them, which means it has to be Rooke.

He can’t just can’t help it.

Dimara reaches from her bed without getting up to let him in, easing the door against the wall.

Rooke blinks. “You’re not asleep?”

“If you thought I was asleep you wouldn’t have knocked,” she points out. He hovers awkwardly by the door, hands shoved in his pockets. He hasn’t looked that way in a while.

Dimara pats the empty bedside next to her, tucking herself back under the first layer of blankets. She didn’t think she’d still feel the cold. Perhaps feeling so jarringly human is what’s getting to her. Something ought to be off - a feeling, or an emotion. Even her temperature, or her heart.

But she’s still warm, and her heart’s still thumping. It doesn’t make any sense.

“Had any existential crises yet?” Rooke asks. He sits down beside her without hardly making an indent over top of the covers.

“None so far. I’ll let you know.”

He nods, sinking back into the pillows, and lets his eyes trail to the ceiling instead, watching the fan spin in slow circles. She watches him at the same pace, observing his fingers fiddling about in a refusal at stillness.

“What’s up?” she asks.

“Promise you won’t yell at me.”

“I won’t.”

“I took something from the house.”

She presses her lips together until they’re a shade off from deathly white.

“You promised,” Rooke reminds her. “I haven’t exactly had the time to look into it, but I thought… well, I had an inkling, and Tanis thinks the same thing. But it’s magic, and obviously he is too, in some way, so they have to be connected.”

He removes something from his pocket, lost in the folds and dark shadows of his sweater for a moment until he lays it in her hand. The glass is smooth and cold, nearly as cold as his hands are where they brush against hers.

It’s not as if these things are abnormal in any way, but neither are they common. More novelty items, if anything. The hourglass almost looks normal, but she can’t pinpoint what’s not.

Before, she thinks, she wouldn’t be able to tell there was anything wrong with it at all.

“So, magic?” she asks.

“It has to be. Now if I could just figure out why he’d have something like this—”

“Then we’d know what he is,” she finishes. But what, is the thing? There has to be meaning behind it.

She holds it up above her head, letting the glass catch and fragment the moonlight from the window. The sand inside is black as the night, the wood at each end almost red, a shade darker than maroon. She tips it this way and that, allowing some of the sand to slip through to the other side in a steady, thin line.

There’s something engraved at one end, hidden away beneath the sand. She lets it run until she can make it out, faded at the edges.

“Isn’t that what was on the hunter’s seal?” Rooke asks. That’s exactly what it is.

A triskelion.

“So that’s where he got it from.”

“Unless it really is his,” she supposes. “And that means…”

“What does that mean?”

“What if it wasn’t sent by that family? What if it was him all along?” That thing that got you, it was in July, and right after that we got the letter. What if he sent it to try and get rid of us ahead of time?”

“You think he’d care enough about us?”

“Maybe? He knew you could see things when you were still alive and that your brother tried to fight him for years. Maybe he was scared that whoever was here now was going to try and fight the same battle.”

“To stop what?” he asks. “The apocalypse. Why do we suddenly have the power to do that?”

“Because we can figure out what he is,” she says, shaking the hourglass. More of the sand transfers to the other side. That’s always what the triskelion has been about - constant motion, a petition to never stop. Life, death and rebirth to some people. Creation, preservation and destruction to others. It’s always the threes.

“If we know what he is, then we can kill him,” Rooke says slowly. It sounds very simple but like that, when it isn’t at all.

He’s been alive for a long time, presumably. He’s killed more people that she’s probably care to count. There have been people dying here for decades now and finally it all seems like it’s coming together.

Everything, after all, is connected.

“Rory said that if he came in here and killed me then he must have believed what I saw was real,” Rooke says. “Do you think he believed me?”

She raises the hourglass again, allowing the sand to even out. It all goes back to the same thing.

“No,” she says slowly. “I think he was what you saw.”

“What?”

“Think about it,” she insists. “People were dying tenfold, and at the same time you saw something in the woods. And we both know exactly what you saw. You saw it, you start hurling accusations, and then someone leads the charge to come up and kill you. What if it’s all the same person - the same thing?”

“Whoever ordered the hit on the council and whatever was killing people back then and who got me, too.”

“And what was in the woods,” she reiterates. “The reaper.”

His eyes are on the ceiling. She rolls over some to look at him, clutching the hourglass even tighter than before. It seems necessary.

“The reaper,” she repeats, and props the hourglass up so it’s resting flat on his stomach and he has no choice but to look at it. The last of the sand runs out again. “And you took his time from him.”

“It just ran out now, too,” he says dazedly.

“And so has his.”

“And how do we fight death, exactly?” he asks. His eyes are huge, terrified. He sits up, back ramrod straight. Already his eyes are on the door like he’s preparing for round two, for a rope to strung up in another entranceway.

“Being alive would be a good start,” he says in a rush. “And neither of us really fit in that department.”

Ignoring the fact that she’s still killable. If someone chops her head from her shoulders there’s no coming back from that, undead or not. It’s that way for most people, really.

But he’s not most people.

“The opposite, I think,” she says. “How is he supposed to get someone who’s already dead?”

Rooke still looks horrified. He believes the theory as much as she does; is it even really a theory? What else in the world would possibly have this just sitting around, magic and all? What would have the power to end the world?

“He’s not,” Rooke says quietly. “He can’t.”

And isn’t that the point of all? There’s no stealing life from something that doesn’t have any. She may, in some respects of the word, still be alive, but there’s no giving him that same title.

Some days she wishes she could.

But everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it? That’s what she’s been preaching since the beginning of time, for as long as she could. It’s what people have ignored for even longer.

She died for a reason. She believes that.

Maybe, just maybe, he did too.

**Author's Note:**

> We're heading towards the end of all of this - only three fics left. Seven will start going up after Christmas if I keep my head above water. See you then.


End file.
